As part of UC San Diego's Early Research Scholars Program and with the mentorship of the Knight lab, our research focuses on exploring the potential relationship between the gut microbiome and COVID-19. This line of questioning emerged from observing the well-documented and supported relationships between the gut microbiome and different comorbidities (such as obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease), as well as how the same comorbidities also have been shown to affect the severity of COVID-19.
In this project, we leverage metagenomic Unifrac to examine the phylogenetic diversity of genes in the gut microbiome in a multigene context. Microbiome data from the American Gut Project/Microsetta inititive. Gene annotations and phylogenies from WoL.