Welcome To:
The Dinsdale Lab
PhD, James Cook University, Australia, 2005
College of Science and Engineering
elizabeth.dinsdale@flinders.edu.au
Office: Biological Sciences, Room 227
Dr. Dinsdale’s lab at Flinders University uses next-generation sequencing to describe the microbial ecology of marine environments, including on coral reefs, kelp forests and the skin of sharks. Our main focus is using shot-gun metagenomics to describe the microbial taxa and functional genes that are associated with different host organisms and how the microbiome changes with host or environmental conditions. This work requires a multi-disciplinary team of students and researchers from various backgrounds including Ecology, Molecular Biology, Bioinformatics, and Computer Science.
Dr. Dinsdale helped establish one of the first university-level classes to offer hands-on experience with next generation sequencing machine. Since 2010, students of the Ecological Metagenomics class have sequenced the California sea lion genome at 12X coverage, and microbial communities from California kelp forest ecosystems, coral reefs from Bermuda and many fish, sharks and rays. Students apply bioinformatics and statistical techniques to analyse the resulting genomes and metagenomes.