Alexander Tyakht
Microbiome Bioinformatics
Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen
IMPRS Adjunct Faculty
Vita
- PhD, Research Institute of Physical-Chemical Medicine, Moscow, 2010-2015
- Research Institute of Physical-Chemical Medicine, Moscow, Russia, Senior Scientist, 2010-2016
- Institute of Gene Biology, Moscow, Russia, Bioinformatics Group Leader, 2018-2022
- Bioinformatics Project Leader at the MPI for Biology since 2022
Research Interest
Host-associated microbial communities manifest astonishing diversity and complex dynamics, whilst maintaining robustness. Of all, to us humans, gut microbiome appears to be the most crucial, being involved in a multitude of bodily functions from digestion to higher nervous activity.
We are interested in answering the questions:
- How did symbiont microbes co-evolve with human and animals?
- What are the principles underlying the temporal stability of microbiome coupled by its ability to response rapidly to external impacts?
- How is the vast functional potential encoded in gut microbial genomes being realized?
To address these questions, we develop and apply algorithms and software pipelines and statistical methods for investigating microbiome sequencing data in the context of health and disease, diet and geography. In addition to conventional metagenomics, we employ its modifications involving high-throughput conformation capture (Hi-C metagenomics).
The outcomes from associative studies provide the basis for elucidating the ecological principles governing community assembly, mechanisms of host-microbiome homeostasis and ultimately approach the translation of microbiome discoveries into practical real-life clinical and nutritional applications.
Examples of the topics we work on in microbiome field:
- Strain-level identification of disease biomarkers and response predictors.
- Diversity of mobile genetic elements in connection to drug resistance.
- Compositional microbiome data analysis.
- Reference-free algorithms for analyzing metagenomes.
- Impact of food and environmental microbiomes on human health.
- Spatial chromosome organization of bacteria and archaea.
Available PhD Projects
- Currently not recruiting doctoral researchers.
Selected Reading
- Ivanova V, Chernevskaya E, Vasiluev P, Ivanov A ... Tyakht A. (2022). Hi-C Metagenomics in the ICU: Exploring Clinically Relevant Features of Gut Microbiome in Chronically Critically Ill Patients. Frontiers in microbiology. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2021.770323
- Klimenko NS, Odintsova VE, Revel-Muroz A and Tyakht AV. (2022). The hallmarks of dietary intervention-resilient gut microbiome. npj Biofilms and Microbiomes. doi: 10.1038/s41522-022-00342-8
- Odintsova VE, Klimenko NS and Tyakht AV. (2022). Approximation of a Microbiome Composition Shift by a Change in a Single Balance Between Two Groups of Taxa. mSystems. doi: 10.1128/msystems.00155-22
- Klimenko NS, Tyakht AV, Popenko AS, Vasiliev AS ... Alexeev DG. (2018). Microbiome responses to an uncontrolled short-term diet intervention in the frame of the citizen science project. Nutrients. doi: 10.3390/nu10050576
- Tyakht AV, Kostryukova ES, Popenko AS, Belenikin MS ... Govorun VM. (2013). Human gut microbiota community structures in urban and rural populations in Russia. Nature communications. doi: 10.1038/ncomms3469