Bonnie L Hurwitz

Bonnie L Hurwitz

Assistant Professor, Agricultural-Biosystems Engineering
Assistant Professor, Genetics - GIDP
Assistant Professor, Statistics-GIDP
Clinical Instructor, Pharmacy Practice-Science
Assistant Professor, BIO5 Institute
Primary Department
Department Affiliations
Contact
(520) 626-9819

Work Summary

Our lab focuses on large-scale –omics datasets, high-throughput computing, and big data analytics. We leverage these technologies to answer questions related to the relationship between microbes, their hosts, and the environment. In particular, we focus on viral-host interactions and co-evolution given environmental factors (i) in aquatic systems and (ii) for phage treatment of diabetic foot ulcers.

Research Interest

Dr. Bonnie Hurwitz is an Assistant Professor of Biosystems Engineering at the University of Arizona and BIO5 Research Institute Fellow. She has worked as a computational biologist for nearly two decades on interdisciplinary projects in both industry and academia. Her research on the human/earth microbiome incorporates large-scale –omics datasets, high-throughput computing, and big data analytics towards research questions in “One Health”. In particular, Dr. Hurwitz is interested in the relationship between the environment, microbial communities, and their hosts. Dr. Hurwitz is well-cited for her work in computational biology in diverse areas from plant genomics to viral metagenomics with over 1200 citations

Publications

Hurwitz, B. L., Westveld, A. H., Brum, J. R., & Sullivan, M. B. (2014). Modeling ecological drivers in marine viral communities using comparative metagenomics and network analyses. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111(29), 10714-9.

Long-standing questions in marine viral ecology are centered on understanding how viral assemblages change along gradients in space and time. However, investigating these fundamental ecological questions has been challenging due to incomplete representation of naturally occurring viral diversity in single gene- or morphology-based studies and an inability to identify up to 90% of reads in viral metagenomes (viromes). Although protein clustering techniques provide a significant advance by helping organize this unknown metagenomic sequence space, they typically use only ∼75% of the data and rely on assembly methods not yet tuned for naturally occurring sequence variation. Here, we introduce an annotation- and assembly-free strategy for comparative metagenomics that combines shared k-mer and social network analyses (regression modeling). This robust statistical framework enables visualization of complex sample networks and determination of ecological factors driving community structure. Application to 32 viromes from the Pacific Ocean Virome dataset identified clusters of samples broadly delineated by photic zone and revealed that geographic region, depth, and proximity to shore were significant predictors of community structure. Within subsets of this dataset, depth, season, and oxygen concentration were significant drivers of viral community structure at a single open ocean station, whereas variability along onshore-offshore transects was driven by oxygen concentration in an area with an oxygen minimum zone and not depth or proximity to shore, as might be expected. Together these results demonstrate that this highly scalable approach using complete metagenomic network-based comparisons can both test and generate hypotheses for ecological investigation of viral and microbial communities in nature.

Hass-Jacobus, B. L., Futrell-Griggs, M., Abernathy, B., Westerman, R., Goicoechea, J., Stein, J., Klein, P., Hurwitz, B., Zhou, B., Rakhshan, F., Sanyal, A., Gill, N., Lin, J., Walling, J. G., Luo, M. Z., Ammiraju, J. S., Kudrna, D., Kim, H. R., Ware, D., , Wing, R. A., et al. (2006). Integration of hybridization-based markers (overgos) into physical maps for comparative and evolutionary explorations in the genus Oryza and in Sorghum. BMC genomics, 7, 199.

With the completion of the genome sequence for rice (Oryza sativa L.), the focus of rice genomics research has shifted to the comparison of the rice genome with genomes of other species for gene cloning, breeding, and evolutionary studies. The genus Oryza includes 23 species that shared a common ancestor 8-10 million years ago making this an ideal model for investigations into the processes underlying domestication, as many of the Oryza species are still undergoing domestication. This study integrates high-throughput, hybridization-based markers with BAC end sequence and fingerprint data to construct physical maps of rice chromosome 1 orthologues in two wild Oryza species. Similar studies were undertaken in Sorghum bicolor, a species which diverged from cultivated rice 40-50 million years ago.

Myles, S., Chia, J., Hurwitz, B., Simon, C., Zhong, G. Y., Buckler, E., & Ware, D. (2010). Rapid genomic characterization of the genus vitis. PloS one, 5(1), e8219.

Next-generation sequencing technologies promise to dramatically accelerate the use of genetic information for crop improvement by facilitating the genetic mapping of agriculturally important phenotypes. The first step in optimizing the design of genetic mapping studies involves large-scale polymorphism discovery and a subsequent genome-wide assessment of the population structure and pattern of linkage disequilibrium (LD) in the species of interest. In the present study, we provide such an assessment for the grapevine (genus Vitis), the world's most economically important fruit crop. Reduced representation libraries (RRLs) from 17 grape DNA samples (10 cultivated V. vinifera and 7 wild Vitis species) were sequenced with sequencing-by-synthesis technology. We developed heuristic approaches for SNP calling, identified hundreds of thousands of SNPs and validated a subset of these SNPs on a 9K genotyping array. We demonstrate that the 9K SNP array provides sufficient resolution to distinguish among V. vinifera cultivars, between V. vinifera and wild Vitis species, and even among diverse wild Vitis species. We show that there is substantial sharing of polymorphism between V. vinifera and wild Vitis species and find that genetic relationships among V. vinifera cultivars agree well with their proposed geographic origins using principal components analysis (PCA). Levels of LD in the domesticated grapevine are low even at short ranges, but LD persists above background levels to 3 kb. While genotyping arrays are useful for assessing population structure and the decay of LD across large numbers of samples, we suggest that whole-genome sequencing will become the genotyping method of choice for genome-wide genetic mapping studies in high-diversity plant species. This study demonstrates that we can move quickly towards genome-wide studies of crop species using next-generation sequencing. Our study sets the stage for future work in other high diversity crop species, and provides a significant enhancement to current genetic resources available to the grapevine genetic community.

Armstrong, D. G., Lew, E. J., Hurwitz, B. L., & Wild, T. (2015). The quest for tissue repair’s holy grail: the promise of wound diagnostics or just another fishing expedition?. Wound Medicine, 8, 1-5.
Alberti, A., Poulain, J., Engelen, S., Labadie, K., Romac, S., Ferrera, I., Albini, G., Aury, J. M., Belser, C., Bertrand, A., Cruaud, C., Da Silva, C., Dossat, C., Gavory, F., Gas, S., Guy, J., Haquelle, M., Jacoby, E., Jaillon, O., , Lemainque, A., et al. (2017). Viral to metazoan marine plankton nucleotide sequences from the Tara Oceans expedition. Scientific data, 4, 170093.

A unique collection of oceanic samples was gathered by the Tara Oceans expeditions (2009-2013), targeting plankton organisms ranging from viruses to metazoans, and providing rich environmental context measurements. Thanks to recent advances in the field of genomics, extensive sequencing has been performed for a deep genomic analysis of this huge collection of samples. A strategy based on different approaches, such as metabarcoding, metagenomics, single-cell genomics and metatranscriptomics, has been chosen for analysis of size-fractionated plankton communities. Here, we provide detailed procedures applied for genomic data generation, from nucleic acids extraction to sequence production, and we describe registries of genomics datasets available at the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA, www.ebi.ac.uk/ena). The association of these metadata to the experimental procedures applied for their generation will help the scientific community to access these data and facilitate their analysis. This paper complements other efforts to provide a full description of experiments and open science resources generated from the Tara Oceans project, further extending their value for the study of the world's planktonic ecosystems.