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Dr. Dhwani Desai

Research Associate

Research

I am interested in studying the microbial diversity in marine ecosystems and understanding how the microbial community evolves in response to the physico-chemical changes in the environment. My current work involves developing and using computational tools and pipelines for the taxonomic and functional profiling of high-throughput next-generation sequencing data (genomes, metagenomes and metatranscriptomes) from marine environments. I have helped analyze meta-omic data from marine environments such as Oxygen Minimum Zones, mesocosms from the arctic sea, etc. As the computational biologist in the LaRoche group at AV¾ãÀÖ²¿, I have undertaken the implementation of protocols for phylogenetic analysis for functional genes and MySql database access protocols for use by the entire group.

Publications

Willis C, Desai D, LaRoche J. 2019. Influence of 16S rRNA variable region on perceived diversity of marine microbial communities of the Northern North Atlantic. FEMS Microbiology Letters, fnz152.

Kalvelage T, Lavik G, Jensen M, Revsbech N, Löscher C, Schunck H, Desai D, Hauss H, Kiko R, Holtappels M, Laroche J, A Schmitz R, I Graco M, MM Kuypers M. 2015. Aerobic Microbial Respiration In Oceanic Oxygen Minimum Zones. PLoS ONE. 10(7). 

Ratten J, LaRoche J, Desai D, Shelley R, Landing W, Boyle E, Cutter G, Langlois R. 2014. Sources of iron and phosphate affect the distribution of diazotrophs in the North Atlantic. Deep Sea Research Part II Topical Studies in Oceanography. 116. 

Schunck H, Lavik G, Desai D, Grobkopf T, Kalvelage T, Löscher C, Paulmier A, Contreras S, Siegel H, Holtappels M, Tosenstiel P, Schilhabel M, Graco M, A Schimitz R, MM Kuypers M, LaRoche J. 2013. Giant Hydrogen Sulfide Plume In The Oxygen Minimum Zone Off Peru Supports Chemolithoautotrophy. PloS one. 8(8). 

Desai D, Schunck H, W Löser J, LaRoche J. 2013. Fragment Recruitment on Metabolic Pathways (FROMP): Comparative metabolic profiling of metagenomes and metatranscriptomes. Bioinformatics (Oxford, England). 29(6). 

Desai D, Desai F, LaRoche J. 2012. Factors Influencing the Diversity of Iron Uptake Systems in Aquatic Microorganisms. Fronters in microbiology. 3:362. 

Desai D, Nandi S, Srivastava P, Lynn A. 2011. ModEnzA: Accurate Identification of Metabolic Enzymes Using Function Specific Profile HMMs with Optimised Discrimination Threshold and Modified Emission Probabilities. Advances in vioinformatics. 2011:1687-8027. 

Joshi FR, Desai DK, Archana G, Desai AJ. 2009. Enhanced Survival and Nodule Occupancy of Pigeon pea Nodulating Rhizobium sp. ST1 expressing fegA Gene of Bradyrhizobium japonicum 61A152. OnLine Journal of Biological Sciences. 9(2). 

Srivastava P, Desai D, Nandi S, Lynn A. 2007. HMM-ModE – Improved classification using profile hidden Markov models by optimising the discrimination threshold and modifying emission probabilities with negative training sequences. BMC bioinformatics. 8(1):104.