Dr. Ilias Lagkouvardos is a microbial ecologist and data integration enthusiast who utilizes bioinformatic methods and tools to address questions related to microbial diversity and ecology in various environments. The primary focus of his research group is the elucidation of the role of distinct microbial compositions in human health and disease by means of sequencing of the versatile 16S rRNA gene. In addition, he explores microbial genomics and metagenomics sequences for insights into the functionality and dynamics of complex microbial communities.
One main line of research in the Lagkouvardos group is to utilize state-of-the-art methods and tools to build specialized analytical pipelines and thereby develop user-friendly bioinformatic solutions for public use. One example of such novel bioifnormatic tool is the IMNGS platform (www.imngs.org), a web database that automatically retrieves all publically available 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequences and processes them in a uniform and organized way. The group also released Rhea, a set of R scripts for the analysis of microbial profiles (lagkouvardos.github.io/Rhea/). Courses disseminating expert knowledge on sequence analysis and demonstrating the usability of these tools are organized regularly.
- Lagkouvardos I, Fischer S, K¬umar N, and Clavel T. 2017. Rhea: a transparent and modular R pipeline for microbial profiling based on 16S rRNA gene amplicons. PeerJ 5:e2836.
- Lagkouvardos I, Joseph D, Kapfhammer M, Giritli S, Horn M, Haller D, and Clavel T. 2016. IMNGS: A comprehensive open resource of processed 16S rRNA microbial profiles for ecology and diversity studies. Sci Rep 6:33721.
- Lagkouvardos I, Pukall R, Abt B, Foesel BU, Meier-Kolthoff JP, Kumar N, Bresciani A, Martinez I, Just S, Ziegler C, Brugiroux S, Garzetti D, Wenning M, Bui TP, Wang J, Hugenholtz F, Plugge CM, Peterson DA, Hornef MW, Baines JF, Smidt H, Walter J, Kristiansen K, Nielsen HB, Haller D, Overmann J, Stecher B, and Clavel T. 2016. The Mouse Intestinal Bacterial Collection (miBC) provides host-specific insight into cultured diversity and functional potential of the gut microbiota. Nat Microbiol 1:16131.
- Lagkouvardos I, Klaring K, Heinzmann SS, Platz S, Scholz B, Engel KH, Schmitt-Kopplin P, Haller D, Rohn S, Skurk T, and Clavel T. 2015. Gut metabolites and bacterial community networks during a pilot intervention study with flaxseeds in healthy adult men. Mol Nutr Food Res 59:1614-1628.
- Lagkouvardos I, Weinmaier T, Lauro FM, Cavicchioli R, Rattei T, and Horn M. 2014. Integrating metagenomic and amplicon databases to resolve the phylogenetic and ecological diversity of the Chlamydiae. ISME J 8:115-125.