Latent variable models for phage-bacteria interaction network at strain-level

Music City Center 

Phage, their bacterial hosts and phage–bacteria interactions strongly influence global biogeochemical cycles, incidence of human diseases, and patterns of microbial genome diversity. It is important to characterize such interaction patterns and underlying processes using the empirical data. We present several latent variant models to study phage–bacterial interactions as networks rather than as coupled interactions in isolation. We show that such models fit empirical data of phage-bacterial interactions well. Such models provide computational tools to connect genomic, functional, and ecological information in predicting cross-infection at the community scale.

Network modeling

Bipartite graph

Markov chain Monte Carlo

Matrix completion

Phage-bacteria coevolution