Enhancing Microbial Insights in Cancerous Tissue: Unveiling the Hidden Microbiome with an Advanced Host Depletion Pipeline

This July, our webinar features Ms. Caitlin Guccione of UCSD, who will give an insightful talk on the cancer microbiome, and a novel pipeline for extracting microbial communities from cancerous tissue samples. Ms. Guccione’s approach improves upon existing methods by effectively capturing more microbial reads while minimizing human contamination.

Key points of this webinar include:

• The novel pipeline’s effectiveness in filtering out irrelevant reads, providing a clearer understanding of the cancer microbiome.

• The significance of comprehending the tumor tissue microbiome, which opens avenues for analyzing disease trajectories along with potential therapeutic interventions.

More about the speaker

Caitlin Guccione

Ms. Guccione is a graduate of the University of Rhode Island (’22) with a bachelor’s degree in applied math and computer science and a master’s in applied math. Since then, she has pursued a PhD in bioninformatics and systems biology at UCSD, co-advised by Dr. Rob Knight and Dr. Kit Curtius. Her dissertation focuses on exploring mathematical modeling of the cancer microbiome.