Seeing the invisible: How bioinformatics reveals hidden life

We have never seen, grown, or named most bacteria on Earth. Yet, bacteria have a big influence on the environment, health, and the survival of modern medicine. For most of scientific history, these microbes remained invisible because we could not culture them in the laboratory. That changed when we began reading DNA directly. 

This talk tells the story of how microbiology moved from petri dishes to sequencing machines, and how bioinformatics became the key to unlocking this hidden world. I show how massive sequencing datasets on powerful computers are transformed into knowledge about microbial communities, their functions, and their risks, but also which challenges still remain. 

Ultimately, this is a story about why bioinformatics has become central to modern microbiology and why many important discoveries still lie hidden in the data.

(Photo: Shutterstock)