By Kaitlin O'Brien
Faculty of Arts
For Aparajita Bhattacharya, who is graduating with a Master of Arts degree in Public Issues Anthropology, the interdisciplinary nature of her graduate student experience opened doors to new research paths and an exciting future.
With a background in data science and a passion for anthropology, particularly bioarchaeology, Bhattacharya’s research explored how bioinformatics can be integrated with anthropology and bioarchaeology to answer questions about infectious disease in the ancient past, and the social and cultural contexts in which they emerged.
In collaboration with her supervisor Dr. Alexis Dolphin from the Department of Anthropology and Dr. Andrew Doxey, their collaborator from the Department of Biology, Bhattacharya aimed to identify ancient Brucella, a group of infection-causing bacteria, in human metagenomes. In other words, Bhattacharya’s research explored the total DNA from ancient human bone samples that had been published in a public DNA database.
“I became interested in using data science and bioinformatics in anthropology because it can allow new explorations of old data by re-analyzing ancient DNA to answer fresh questions,” she explains. “This method is crucial as ethical concerns about destructive sampling in ancient DNA research grow. Researchers now need to prioritize non or minimally destructive techniques when working with human remains.”
Read the original article published in ݮƵ News: Combining anthropology and bioinformatics to unveil ancient disease histories.