Daniel Figeys
Prof. Daniel Figeys is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology and Immunology and a member of the Ottawa Institute of Systems Biology. Daniel obtained a B.Sc. and a M.Sc. in chemistry from the Université de Montréal. He obtained a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Alberta and did his postdoctoral studies at the University of Washington. Prior to his current position, Dr. Figeys was Senior VP of System Biology and Lead Profiling with MDS-Proteomics (2000-2004). He was responsible for all the analytical functions of MDS-Proteomics.
Figeys’ team is studying the interaction between the host and gut microbiome in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in a pediatric cohort. They use proteomics to discover the changes in the host, metaproteomics to study the functional changes occurring in the microbiome, and cross-kingdom analysis to reveal potential relationships between the host and microbiome.
They are also developing bioinformatics tools for the identification and quantitation of metaproteomes. They adopted an iterative database search strategy, termed MetaPro-IQ, which constructs a shrunken, sample-specific, non-redundant database. The resulting sample-specific database was used to obtain high-efficiency protein identifications in the analysis of gut microbiome samples. They also developed a fully automated, data processing software platform termed MetaLab, which includes new data processing approaches to speed up searches, and covers the major components of the bioinformatics and statistical pipelines for metaproteomics.