The Bioinformatics Research Group (BioRG) in the School of Computing and Information Sciences, at Florida International University (FIU), is a multi-discipliary research group headed by Prof. Giri Narasimhan. The group works on problems from the fields of Bioinformatics, Machine Learning, Biotechnology, Data Mining, Visualization, Software Engineering, and more. The group's research projects include Microbiome Data Analysis, Epigenetics, Antibiotics resistance, Software Engineering, Visualization, Cancer Informatics, Electronic Health Records, Comparative Genomics of Bacterial genomes, Genomic databases, Pattern Discovery in sequences and structures, prediction of regulatory elements, primer design, probe design, phylogenetic analysis, medical image processing, image analysis, data integration, data mining, information retrieval, and more. The current focus of this research group is the development of tools and techniques for state-of-the-art Multi-omic Integrative Analysis and Causality in Microbiomes.

Recent Exciting Research from this group includes:

• Combining metagenome, metaresistome, metareplicome, and causal inference (Microb Genom, 2022)
• Lower respiratory tract microbiome in smokers (Campos et al., Access Microb, 2022)
• Longitudinal multi-omic microbiome analysis (Ruiz-Perez et al., mSystems, 2021)
• Causal inferencing in microbiomes (Sazal et al., BMC Genomics, 2020; Sazal et al., Scientific Reports, 2021)
• Effect of metronidazole on vaginal microbiota associated with asymptotic bacterial vaginosis (Ruiz-Perez, Access Microb, 2021)
• "So You Think You Can PLS-DA" (Ruiz-Perez et al., BMC Bioinformatics, 2020)
• ADHD microbiome (Cickovski et al., J Medical Microb, 2020)
• Alpha-1 lung microbiome (Cickovski et al., book chapter, 2020)
• Visualizing microbiome profiles (Valdes et al., under review, 2020)