Matt Morben, a Biochemistry major, received this award in part due to his work on a project to understand the microbiome of ornate box turtles. From samples collected from turtles, compared are the bacteria, viruses, and other biological stuff found in the samples to determine if turtles primarily get their microbiomes from each other or from their environment. From this information, there are a lot of statistical techniques to compare the diversity and composition of the different samples.
In order to do this kind of experiment, all of the DNA in each sample is broken into little pieces, each piece is sequenced, and the millions of fragments in each sample are assembled back into whole genomes, and then compared to databases of known genome sequences to identify them. Matt has been working all year to develop a pipeline to do the sequence assembly and identification. He has had to understand a variety of different file formats, learn what tools are available at each step, identify the ones that will meet his needs, and make sure all of the file formats will work together. Most of these tools operate on the command line, so he's had to learn that skill. At this point we have the computing pipeline ready to go and Matt has identified several tools to specifically look for bacteriophages in the millions of sequences we will get back. Once he has done the assembly and mapping, he will use statistical techniques like PCA to compare the microbial communities found in each sample.