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hutlab.bsky.social
Hutlab
@hutlab.bsky.social
The Huttenhower Lab at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health: microbial community function and human microbiome population health;
Moderators: @jtnearing.bsky.social, @chahat.bsky.social
Eric @efranzosa.bsky.social and Kelsey from the lab started teaching BST 281 - Genomic Data Manipulation, a couple weeks ago! It covers genomic sequence analysis, high throughput data analysis and cool topics that are currently of importance in the field 🧑‍🎓
February 2, 2026 at 3:39 PM
Fun time at Time Out market!
January 29, 2026 at 8:08 PM
Huge thanks to everyone who took BST272 (Computing Environments for Biology) this year! It’s an intense few weeks as intro to working at the terminal, and we hope folks build on it in courses like BST281. This was our first year integrating AI into the curriculum—thanks for all the great feedback!
January 29, 2026 at 4:21 PM
Aaaaand this one is from Curtis!
January 29, 2026 at 12:18 AM
Boston recently had its biggest snow of the season so far. Here are some snow pictures from Hutlab members! ❄️🌨️🐶
January 27, 2026 at 8:25 PM
Congratulations to Yehoon Jo @yehoon.bsky.social who finished his PhD lab rotation in the Hutlab last semester and is joining the lab as a PhD student! 🎉
January 16, 2026 at 3:24 AM
Congratulations to Sagun Maharjan @sagunmaharjann.bsky.social for graduating with a Masters in Computer Science from Georgia Tech while working at the Hutlab!
January 16, 2026 at 3:18 AM
Congratulations to Curtis and Eric Franzosa from the lab for being featured in the Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers of 2025 (in both Biology/Biochemistry and Microbiology categories)! clarivate.com/highly-cited... 🎉
Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers 2025
The Highly Cited Researchers 2025 list identifies and celebrates individuals who have demonstrated significant and broad influence in their fields of research. Through rigorous selection criteria and ...
clarivate.com
January 9, 2026 at 4:23 PM
Happy holidays from the Hutlab!! 🎉☃️
December 25, 2025 at 10:11 PM
A huge thanks to Cancer Grand Challenges @cancergrand.bsky.social , @cam.ac.uk and Dr. Nic Walton for organizing a two-day Data Workshop to address data and computing challenges across the group. Chahat gave a presentation of his work, and Curtis led a session on best practices for use of AI/ML!
December 19, 2025 at 3:45 PM
Reposted by Hutlab
Huge thanks to Curtis for spending some time with us here in Happy Valley - if you missed his talk, you can check it out here on our YouTube channel: youtu.be/andhyvSyt6c?...
December 16, 2025 at 3:31 PM
10/ Special thanks to our collaborators @hillspet.bsky.social for their contributions and feedback throughout the development of Parathaa.
December 18, 2025 at 8:08 PM
9/ Any feedback or issues can be directed to our forum at: forum.biobakery.org.
The bioBakery help forum
A place to ask for help with bioBakery tools
forum.biobakery.org
December 18, 2025 at 8:08 PM
8/ Parathaa is openly available for use by the community and can be used to assign amplicons to both SILVA and GTDB taxonomy. github.com/biobakery/pa...
GitHub - biobakery/parathaa: Preserving and Assimilating Region-specific Ambiguities in Taxonomic Hierarchical Assignments for Amplicons (Parathaa)
Preserving and Assimilating Region-specific Ambiguities in Taxonomic Hierarchical Assignments for Amplicons (Parathaa) - biobakery/parathaa
github.com
December 18, 2025 at 8:08 PM
7/ Moreover, application of Parathaa to real-world data identified cases where taxonomic labels found within databases were likely incorrect or incompatible with sequence phylogeny.
December 18, 2025 at 8:08 PM
6/ We found that Parathaa performed in F1, precision, and recall just as well or better than commonly used amplicon assignment methods while also allowing for finer species resolution.
December 18, 2025 at 8:08 PM
5/ We validated Parathaa on seven synthetic Silva datasets and historic holdout data from GTDB using both full‑length 16S rRNA amplicons and amplicons of the V1V2 and V4V5 regions.
December 18, 2025 at 8:08 PM
4/ Parathaa works in two main steps:
- Build an optimized, primer‑specific map linking phylogenetic placement to taxonomy.
- Apply this map to assign zero or more taxonomic labels to each sequence.
December 18, 2025 at 8:08 PM
3/ Parathaa aims to address these issues by directly modelling taxonomic sequence ambiguity within sequenced amplicon regions: i.e. allowing for assignments to multiple taxonomic labels when phylogenetically warranted.
December 18, 2025 at 8:08 PM
2/ Amplicon data often contains unique biases due to primer incompatibilities and the inability to differentiate between certain microbes due to low sequence variability, especially at the species level.
December 18, 2025 at 8:08 PM
1/ We are excited to announce Parathaa: a new method for improving taxonomic classification of amplicon sequencing data. Parathaa aims to directly model sequence ambiguity to identify amplicons to the finest taxonomic level possible. academic.oup.com/nar/article/...
Capturing sequence ambiguity among taxa in a primer-specific manner to improve taxonomic classification of amplicon sequencing
Abstract. Amplicon sequencing, a common strategy to taxonomically profile microbial communities, is relatively low cost and high throughput. However, it is
academic.oup.com
December 18, 2025 at 8:08 PM
Eric also teaches graduate courses in Bioinformatics and Python programming at the School alongside the Lab’s own microbiome training workshops. Eric is an avid tabletop gamer outside of work (and inside, where appropriate) and never misses an episode of Saturday Night Live :)
December 12, 2025 at 2:31 PM