Bioinformatics: Data Integration for Biomonitoring Applications

Aret Associates and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) propose an interdisciplinary effort to meet the challenges of developing a soil microbiome-based nuclear activity biomonitoring application. Our approach combines Arets expertise in decision theory and bioinformatics with ORNLs subject matter expertise in microbial ecology and contaminant signatures. We will adapt and extend our high feature space detection theoretic algorithms and apply false alarm reduction techniques honed by Aret over decades in stressing weak signal national security applications. The contaminant detector, which will include mechanisms for incorporating and rigorously combining subject matter expertise and data-driven signature discoveries, will operate on a feature space that exploits 16S rRNA as well as information theoretic features. We will evaluate the contaminant detectors performance using existing datasets, including an initial metagenome sequencing database consisting of samples from groundwater at the Oak Ridge Field Research Center.