Nailah Ali

Hi! I’m Nailah. I’m a sophomore at DePaul studying computer science. Outside of school and research, my interests include language, nutrition, and fashion.

BS in Computer Science

Ustun, Ilyas

nailahali314@gmail.com

Project: Investigating the Connection Between Certain Diseases and Gut microbiome

Recent advances in gut genome classification assess the relationship between the health of the human gut microbiome and overall health. Methods such as 16s rRNA and shotgun genome sequencing allow for high-resolution features and increased access to the gut microbiome. In this study, we investigate diseases such as liver cirrhosis, colorectal cancer, inflammatory bowel diseases, obesity, and Type 2 diabetes and hypothesize that specific bacterial strains will be found in the gut which are related to specific diseases. We use both supervised (classification) and unsupervised (clustering) machine learning techniques to investigate such relationships. Discovering the strains that are correlated to particular diseases may guide us a step forward in finding better treatment for such illnesses by targeting the specific bacteria.