Gut microbiota have an effect on human health, but how they work is not known well enough.Previous studies have mainly focused on discovering the composition of microbiota, while there is still very little information about the behaviour of gut microbiota at protein level. Metaproteomics is a good method for studying human gut microbiota, because it can identify and categorise the proteins involved.
“Metaproteomics requires massive computing power, because identification is so difficult. As reference, we have millions of possible proteins from thousands of bacteria, which we are trying to identify in the samples. However, we get really accurate and comparable measurements as a result,” says reseacher Tomi Suomi from the University of Turku.
Suomi is a member of the reserach team which is using the computing power of Finland’s ELIXIR node CSC – IT Center for Science. The virtual computers of CSC have been connected as an extension of the local computing cluster of the University of Turku.
According to Suomi, this measurement method seems to be working really well for clinical samples. Future applications may include comparable measurements of stool samples in biobanks.
“We may have hundreds of samples from different individuals. At the moment, using this method alone, we are able to perform sufficiently comparable measurements between individuals, for example as part of studying how diseases develop. With the new method, it will be possible to study large cohorts.”
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ELIXIR is partly funded by the European Commission