Scientific Biography

My work spans two subfields of computational biology: bioimage informatics and metagenomics-based microbial ecology. I started in the first and, since 2013, have worked mostly in the second; since 2018, I have led my own group, first at Fudan University (Shanghai) and, since 2023, at the Centre for Microbiome Research at the Queensland University of Technology (Brisbane).

Bioimage informatics (fluorescence microscopy image analysis)

During my PhD work at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) working with Prof. Robert F. Murphy, I developed methods for the automated analysis of fluorescence microscopy images for subcellular location analysis: the analysis of cellular images of eukaryotic cells where one or more protein or structure of interest has been tagged fluorescently. At CMU, I initially worked on the SLIF project, which extracted and reanalysed images embedded in published literature. This project combined image analysis and text modeling. I worked on the image analysis component, extending the system beyond fluorescence microscopy panels to encompass other types of images. The SLIF project was one of 4 finalists in the Elsevier Grand Challenge (Ahmed et al., 2009; Coelho et al., 2010).

I then developed and implemented machine learning methods for deconvolving mixtures of location patterns (when a protein is present, in differing quantities, in more than one location, e.g., the nucleus and the cytoplasm). I extended previous work that solved the supervised version of this problem —when the basis patterns are known and given to the algorithm (Peng et al., 2010)—to work in an unsupervised fashion (Coelho*, Peng*, et al., 2011).

One basic task in the field of bioimage analysis is classification of subcellular patterns (and, more generally, supervised classification of phenotypes). Although this was one of the original problems that sparked the field (Boland et al., 1998), most of the methods in the field were evaluated using a simplistic method framework: namely, several images of the same protein using the same tagging method were used to represent a given pattern (e.g., LAMP2 was used to represent lysosomes). These images were then repeatedly partitioned into training and testing so that algorithms were learned on the training set and evaluated on the testing one. This is known as cross-validation and is an excellent way to measure of the accuracy when the task is to recognize the given protein. However, as I showed in (Coelho et al., 2013) this leads to an over-inflated measure of performance when the real task is to extrapolate from the patterns exhibited by known proteins to proteins of unknown localization. In fact, the algorithm can obtain high accuracy by learning to recognize artifactual information (e.g., how bright the tagging is). I adapted the SURF method (Bay et al., 2006) to work in the subcellular domain and showed that they perform significantly better in generalization. The image data used to validate this dataset was collected by myself and annotated by 3 different experts, including myself.

Another domain where I successfully developed machine learning techniques for bioimage analysis is that of quantifying neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) in tagged images. This problem could be, in principle, solved using segmentation: once the area of the field where NETs are present has been segmented, quantification is trivial. However preliminary work showed that it is a hard problem; particularly as different experts disagree on the exact segmentation of any particular image. Nonetheless, despite extensive pixel-level disagreement, experts report very similar measures on overall amount of NETs present in an image. Thus, I developed a method which uses imperfect segmentation and random forest regression to achieve a high correlation between the algorithm and the human operator; the cross-validated R² is 93% (Coelho et al., 2015).

As part of this body of work, I developed the mahotas Python library for computer vision (Coelho, 2013). This package includes several general-purpose algorithms for image processing and it has been used by others in bioimage analysis as well as in other domains.

I later applied some of the same techniques in the context of identifying protists in high-throughput fluorescence microscopy (Colin*, Coelho*, et al., 2017). In this work, I developed the computational pipeline for processing fluorescence microscopy images of environmental (marine) samples containing a mixture of protists. The system automatically segments the images to extract individual objects (individual organisms or debris) and classifies them into one of 155 classes with 82% accuracy (which is on par with the inter-operator agreement measured for similar problems). In addition to the challenge of processing a large dataset (>300,000 objects), when compared to the tissue culture problems on which I had worked on before, environmental samples exhibit higher variability in the morphology and brightness of the different objects.

Microbial ecology using metagenomics (EMBL, 2013–2018)

From 2013 to 2018, I worked with Peer Bork, at EMBL (Heidelberg). In his lab, I continued to work on bioimage analysis problems (resulting in the publication of our protist pipeline). However, in parallel, I also extended my expertise to the analysis of metagenomics data to answer microbial ecology questions. In this context, I worked on both method development (including implementing new tools) and applications.

Early on in the Bork lab, I was involved in developing the mOTUs tool (metagenomic OTUs), an approach for taxonomic quantification of metagenomic samples which extends reference based methods to be able to infer the existence of species for which there is no reference genome based on metagenomics data (Sunagawa et al., 2013).

Subsequently, as part of the Tara Oceans project, I worked on analysing the relationship between prokaryotic community composition and environmental parameters (Sunagawa*, Coelho*, Chaffron* et al., 2015). As part of this work, we built and presented a gene catalog of the marine prokaryotic world. When we related the taxonomic or functional profiles of each metagenome to environmental parameters of the sample (measured in situ), we concluded that temperature is the main environmental determinant of microbial community composition at the surface: in particular, microbial composition can be used to predict temperature with very high precision (cross-validated R²: 86%) using a simple machine-learning based method I developed. I have used the same model in other context, e.g., predicting Parkinson disease from gut microbiome profiles (Bedarf*, Hildebrand* et al., 2017).

At the time, I also worked on improving the implementation of metagenomics data processing code in MOCAT (version 1 of the tool would not have been able to process the Tara oceans dataset in a reasonable timeframe). That work was later included in the next version of the tool, namely MOCAT2 (Kultima et al., 2016).

I also built a gene catalog of the dog gut microbiome as part of the analysis of a randomized diet study of dogs (high-protein low-carbohydrate vs. low-protein high-carbohydrate diets). This gene catalog contains 1.24 million genes. We compared it to existing mammal gut catalogs (for human, pig, and mouse) and found that only a small minority of genes are present in more than one mammalian gut. Among the different non-human animal microbiomes considered, the dog microbiome was overall the most similar to the human gut microbiome. Using the metaSNV tool (Costea*, Munch*, et al., 2017), which I helped develop, we were able to determine that even when the same species was detected in both human and dog microbiota, there were clearly distinct strains. Thus the observed similarity between these two microbiomes is not due to recent strain sharing. Finally, we analysed the effects of the dietary intervention and observed that the dog microbiome responded in similar ways to the human one. A novel finding, however, was that the microbiome of overweight/obese dogs shifted more in compositional space upon a change of diet, when compared to the microbiome of lean/normal dogs. This is consistent with the so called Anna Karenina hypothesis that dysbiotic microbiomes are more diverse than healthy ones and it is a finding that should be tested in humans (Coelho et al., 2018).

To analyse these datasets, I have developed a tool, called NGLess (see https://www.big-data-biology.org/software/ngless/) which is based on a new approach (a domain specific language for sequence processing) to ensure reproducibility of the processing pipelines. In addition to building upon the afore-mentioned MOCAT/MOCAT2 tools, this work incorporates ideas from a generic reproducible computational pipeline tool, Jug, that I have developed throughout the last decade as a support tool for my own projects, but which has since used by others as well (Coelho, 2017).

I also worked on validating the use of the eggnog-mapper tool on metagenomics data (Huerta-Cepas et al., 2017), which is now our state-of-the-art tool for gene annotation.

I contributed to analysing how the planktonic community structure contributes to carbon capture (Guidi*, Chaffron*, Bittner* et al., 2016), how antibiotic resistance is distributed across geography (Forslund et al., 2014), how the infant microbiome is formed (Korpela et al., 2018), and how there is a natural structure to the bacterial world below species level, what we termed subspecies (Costea et al., 2017).

Leading a group: Fudan University (2018–2023) and QUT (2023–present)

Since 2018, I have led my own group (the Big Data Biology Lab), first at Fudan University in Shanghai and, since 2023, at the Centre for Microbiome Research at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. The group works on the global microbiome: what genes and proteins are out there, how they are distributed across habitats, and what computational methods are needed to find them.

Global gene and protein catalogs

The organizing idea of much of this work is that publicly available metagenomes, taken together, cover a large fraction of the microbial world and can be analysed as a single object. Building on the gene catalogs I had worked on earlier, and in work that started at EMBL, we built the Global Microbial Gene Catalog (GMGC), which unifies genes predicted from metagenomes spanning marine, soil, and host-associated habitats (Coelho et al., 2022; browsable at gmgc.embl.de). Analysing it showed that most genes are rare and specific to a single habitat, so that gene-level diversity is much less shared across environments than species-level comparisons would suggest.

Standard gene prediction discards short open reading frames, so small proteins (fewer than 100 amino acids) are systematically missing from catalogs of this sort, even though they include many bioactive molecules. We therefore built the Global Microbial smORF Catalogue (GMSC), which recovers these small proteins from the same data (Duan et al., 2024; browsable at gmsc.big-data-biology.org). Small proteins have since become the main focus of my research and are the subject of the ARC Future Fellowship I was awarded in 2023.

Antimicrobial peptides

One class of small proteins with obvious practical interest is that of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs). We first built Macrel, a machine-learning pipeline that screens genomes and metagenomes for AMPs (Santos-Júnior et al., 2020), and then applied it at the scale of the global microbiome to produce AMPSphere, a resource of candidate AMPs (Santos-Júnior*, Torres*, et al., 2024, work carried out together with Cesar de la Fuente-Nunez's group). A subset of the candidates was chemically synthesized and tested experimentally, both in vitro and in mouse infection models, confirming that computational prediction at this scale recovers molecules with real antibacterial activity. This work was widely covered in the press.

Methods for metagenomics

Assembling and binning metagenomes is the step that turns raw sequencing data into genomes, and it remained a bottleneck. We developed SemiBin, which uses a siamese neural network to learn, from a small amount of taxonomic annotation, how to group contigs into genomes (Pan et al., 2022). Its successor, SemiBin2, replaces this with self-supervised contrastive learning, removing the dependence on annotation and extending the method to long reads (Pan et al., 2023). SemiBin is freely available. In a related line of work, we developed metaMIC, which identifies and corrects misassemblies without a reference (Lai et al., 2022).

Earlier, I had developed NGLess, a domain-specific language for sequence processing, and NG-meta-profiler, a set of metagenomic profiling pipelines built with it (Coelho et al., 2019). Making research software that outlives the project that produced it is a long-standing interest of mine, which I have also argued for explicitly (Coelho, 2024).

Antimicrobial resistance

Through the EMBARK project and, more recently, the SEARCHER project in Australia, the group also works on antimicrobial resistance in the environment. A recurring problem is that the available tools disagree with each other, in part because they use incompatible vocabularies. We built argNorm, which normalizes the output of different antibiotic resistance gene annotation tools to the Antibiotic Resistance Ontology (Ugarcina Perovic et al., 2025), and then used a normalized comparison to quantify how much the pipelines actually disagree (Inda-Díaz et al., 2026).

Evolution and ecology of prokaryotic genomes

Alongside the method development, we have used these resources to ask ecological and evolutionary questions, such as which pressures drive horizontal gene transfer across prokaryotic genomes (Dmitrijeva et al., 2024, with Christian von Mering's group).

A full list is available on my publications page.

Last updated: September 2026.