CUNY ISPH investigator professor Levi Waldron recently attended the Parkinson’s Disease Collaborative Research Network Meeting in Phoenix, AZ, held in March 2025, as part of a grant from the Michael J Fox Foundation to create a Microbiome Analytics Core (MAC). Post-doc Giacomo Antonello also attended the meeting. Professor Waldron presented on the MAC’s ongoing work, particularly focusing on the development of data resources for Parkinson’s disease (PD) microbiome research.
Levi’s presentation highlighted the PD-specific expansion of BugSigDB (BugSigDB.org), a valuable resource for manually curated microbial signatures related to PD based on 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing data. Additionally, he discussed the PD-specific expansion of curatedMetagenomicData, which involves the re-processing of shotgun sequencing data for higher resolution and standardization, providing per-participant data. The presentation also touched upon the use of ontologies for standardizing metadata and the ongoing efforts in data harmonization and management across studies.
The MAC’s mission is to support researchers from the Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) initiative with study design, data management, analysis, and integration, with the goal of identifying microbiome-based biomarkers for PD and improving the understanding of the microbiome’s role in the disease. This work is a significant contribution to the field and promotes interoperability and hypothesis generation in Parkinson’s and microbiome research.
For more details on and outputs of the Microbiome Analytics Core, please visit the GitHub page: ASAP-MAC GitHub.
