The HACK index for measuring a health-associated gut microbiome, with Dr. Tarini Ghosh PhD

This episode features computational microbiologist Dr. Tarini Ghosh PhD from  Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (Delhi, India) speaking about his recently published paper that proposes a novel Health-Associated Core Keystone (HACK) index for measuring a healthy microbiome. To create the index, the group used a huge volume of sequence data – over 201 terabytes – from more than 45,000 individuals with and without disease across different geographies. The ultimate aim is to create a universal measure for a health-associated microbiome. The HACK index is based on taxa in the gut microbiome, and consists of 3 components:  (1) prevalence and connectedness in the gut microbiome of healthy individuals, (2) longitudinal stability, and (3) association with disease. Keystone taxa were generally more prevalent / abundant in the gut microbiome but not always. The group is now working to connect the identified taxa to specific functions. In the future, this index may be used as a diagnostic tool, possibly to predict a positive response in clinical trials.

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About Dr. Tarini Ghosh PhD:

Dr. Tarini Shankar Ghosh leads the Microbiome Informatics group at the Department of Computational Biology at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology – Delhi, India. His research focuses on mining global microbiome datasets using advanced statistical methods, machine learning, and deep learning to develop predictive models and indexes that can  facilitate formulation of novel microbiome-derived clinical end-points along with the development of generic and population-specific microbiome-derived diagnostics/therapeutics. His research includes identifying the global and cohort-specific markers of microbiome-resilience and disease, investigating the microbiome taxa associated with response to different therapies and cross-body-site microbiome associations.

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