Tara Furstenau

MetaTracer assigns taxonomic and gene expression to metatranscriptomic reads using nucleotide alignment, achieving high accuracy in simulated and real datasets.

This study tracks prevalence and co-carriage of respiratory pathogens in nursing home residents, finding distinct colonization patterns and persistence differences.

This paper develops a low-cost amplicon sequencing assay to rapidly characterize Staphylococcus aureus intrahost diversity directly from samples, enabling transmission analysis without whole-genome sequencing.

This paper introduces and validates population sequencing methods to analyze phylogenetic diversity in bacterial populations without haplotype reconstruction, demonstrating applications in tracking transmission and understanding pathogen dynamics.

This study investigates the relationship between demographic factors, S. mutans colonization, and early childhood caries risk in preschool children from northern Arizona and Hawaii.

The paper investigates leptospirosis transmission among brown rats in Boston, finding high genetic structure and limited dispersal, with Leptospira clades linked to specific rat populations and a human case linked to rats.

This paper evaluates sample pooling methods for pathogen screening, finding that existing methods excel in some areas but not others, and introduces a new method that performs well across multiple criteria.