About

Where are we

The Gloor Lab is located in The Department of Biochemistry at Western University, in London Ontario, Canada.

Projects

We are primarily a computational biology lab.

See Greg Gloor's Google Scholar page for current publications, or scroll to the bottom of this page.

Microbiome sequencing and tools for analyses

Our main projects examine the role and function of the human microbiome, and various environmental microbiomes. We are affiliated with The Canadian Centre for Human Microbiome and Probiotics Research located at the Lawson Health Research Institute in London, Ontario.

We are particularly interested in new methods of sequencing and analysis for high-throughput sequencing projects. We have developed workflows for 16S rRNA gene sequencing, meta-RNAsequencing, and metagenomics. We are currently developing analysis toolsets based upon compositional data analysis (CoDa).

Protein sequence coevolution

We are using variations on mutual information to identify protein active sites. We have found that active sites (binding sites, catalytic sites, domain interfaces) are unexpectedly rich in mutual information. This suggests that the pairs of residues in these interfaces evolve coordinately. We have refined and extended the methodology and can now reliably detect three times as many coevolving positions as our first method. In concert with Andrew Fernandes and Lindi Wahl, we are working on next-generation methods of detecting covariation.

We are now directly testing the hypothesis that coevolving positions are important for structure and function using mutagensis. Positions that coevolve in candidate genes are being mutated and then assayed biochemically and genetically to assess their function.

We believe that the ability to accurately identify coevolving positions in proteins will have broad clinical and fundamental applications, on par with our current abilities to identify and use conserved positions in protein families.