HIIT scientists present the most advanced GWAS method for bacteria to date

A HIIT-wide team led by professor Jukka Corander included several scientists from both UH and Aalto with a joint mission to create the most advanced and computationally best scalable method for genome-wide association (GWAS) studies in bacteria. The team had a close collaboration with the Pathogen Genomics Group at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute where GWAS is an important step towards unraveling the secrets behind evolution and success of numerous major human pathogens from large-scale population genomic data. The new method, SEER, was published in Nature Communications on September 16 and it is already rapidly gaining worldwide popularity among microbiologists. Since SEER is scalable to even tens of thousands of bacterial genome sequences, it will open a totally new era in bacterial GWAS. Details of the method can be found at http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12797