Matthys MG Potgieter HUPO 2019 - 18th Human Proteome Organization World Congress

Matthys MG Potgieter

Matthys Potgieter is a clinician and PhD candidate from the Computational Biology Group at the University of Cape Town whose main focus is the development of high-throughput computational pipelines that provide insights into the determinants of pathogen virulence and human diseases using multi-omics data. Starting his scientific career with a proteogenomic analysis of Mycobacterium smegmatis, he proceeded to work on understanding the molecular determinants of virulence in clinical isolates of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. After identifying the need of researchers analyzing metaproteome data to identify and characterize complex microbial communities and their interactions using an efficient and accurate computational pipeline, he created the open-source MetaNovo software tool to perform fast and scalable analysis of metaproteome samples - enabling the identification of clinical polymorphisms and rare disease causing organisms that would not otherwise have been identified using conventional methods, including peptides from a rare helminth in adult stool samples. The MetaNovo tool has already been used to identify inflammatory biomarkers in the vaginal microbiome, investigate protective factors against HIV transmission in the male urogenital system, as well as characterizing the effects of HIV exposure on the infant gut microbiome, and is publicly available and user friendly. Matthys’ ultimate goal is to refine and validate the MetaNovo pipeline for use in clinical diagnostic applications, and to continue to provide software tools that assist researchers in the proteome science community to gain insights from their data.