Person Dr William C Nelson

Dr. Nelson’s background is in genomic analysis of microbial organisms. He spent 10 years at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), first as a data analyst and then as the team lead for Microbial Annotation. He was involved in some of the earliest bacterial genome sequencing projects, including medically relevant organisms such as Vibrio cholerae, Neisseria meningitidis, Chlamydia muridarum, and Streptococcus pneumoniae. While there, he participated in pioneering work on genome analysis, and helped develop tools and analysis protocols and standards that are still in widespread use today, with a goal of providing the most accurate functional predictions possible through a combination of high-confidence automated methods and intensive manual curation where automated methods were insufficient. He was also involved in some of the earliest metagenomic sequencing projects, first examining BAC clones and then working on true shotgun metagenomics in the Sargasso Sea project.

Since coming to PNNL, he has focused on a more precise understanding of microbial community structure and function through the resolution of individual genome sequences from metagenomic data, and exploration of variation between individuals in microbial populations. Recently, he has focused on integrating proteomics and metabolomics with genomic analysis to achieve a systems biology modeling approach to examining microbial ecology in complex communities such as soil and human gut microbiome.