Artur Trancoso Lopo de Queiroz

Public Health Researcher at Instituto Gonçalo Moniz - FIOCRUZ/BA. I am a PhD-trained and associate professor of Bioinformatics focused primarily on infectious diseases, vector-borne diseases, and public health, and specialize in data analysis from multiple sources including Next-Generation sequencing, microarrays, and publicly available data. My research group is focused on five main topics: (1) Biomarkers and signature identification for disease diagnosis. Our group recently identified immune signatures for Tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis in patients living with HIV, by employing machine learning and Big Data methods in new and publicly available data; (2) Etiological agent analysis, exploring phylogenetic and epitope characteristics of diseases caused by HIV-1, HCV, DENV, ZIKV, CHIKV and YFV; (3) Microbiome characterization in patients with leishmaniasis and in the disease vector, Phlebotomus spp., where our group first described the differences between the microbiome in healthy and lesioned skin from patients with cutaneous leishmaniasis; (4) Identification of biomarkers using publicly available gene expression data from infected individuals and from disease vectors, such as Aedes aegypti, where again, we identified a specific gene expression signature in mosquitoes infected with DENV, WNV, and YFV, which has also been confirmed in ZIKV; and (5) Software development for data management and analysis. Specifically, I have led the development of software for the acquisition and analysis of HIV-1 sequences, which has been adapted for further application in ZIKV, CHIKV, DENV, and YFV. Our group has several active grant-funded collaborations focused on bacterial and host genomic analyses, and we are developing statistical and algorithmic analyses for big data and systems biology.