Pursuing Alien Genes in Bacteria | College of Science
March 13, 2023

Pursuing Alien Genes in Bacteria

Dr. Rajeev Azad, associate professor of bioinformatics and a faculty member in UNT's BioDiscovery Institute, is developing and applying mathematical and computational methods to understand how organisms, specifically microbes, adapt to changing environments. His most recent research published in Microbial Genomics focused on uncovering foreign genes in bacterial genomes by leveraging information-rich genomic resources and developing a new protocol that is highly sensitive to foreign gene detection. Its application led to reconstruction of a network of bacterial gene flow published in Open Biology.

He hopes this new method will encourage others to pursue research in this area since it offers a more efficient way to study Horizontal Gene Transfer quantification.

"It is important to understand how bacteria evolve as they impact us and other life forms in many ways," Dr. Azad says.

In an interview published on the Microbiology Society website, Dr. Azad shares more about his research.