MEMBER INFORMATION
Lukas Simon is the Group leader in Computational Biology at the Therapeutic Innovation Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. Simon earned his Ph.D. in Structural and Computational Biology and Molecular Biophysics at Baylor College of Medicine in 2016 before starting his postdoctoral training at the Institute of Computational Biology at the Helmholtz Research Centre in Munich, where he was awarded a Marie Sklodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship. After this postdoctoral training, Lukas Simon was an Assistant Professor of Health Informatics at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston in the Center for Precision Health. His research focuses on the development and application of data science to biomedical, molecular data. More specifically, his expertise includes bioinformatic analysis and
computational modeling of next generation sequencing data such as (single-cell) RNA-sequencing.
ABM CONFERENCES
Poster Presenter
Microbiome reveals history of human-interactions in the museum - a pilot project
ABM MEMBER EVENTS
PUBLICATIONS + PROJECTS
Lukas M Simon [1], Cecilia Flocco [2], Franziska Burkart [2], Anika Methner [2], David Henke [3], Luise Rauer [4, 5 6], Christian L Müller [6], Johannes Vogel [7], Christiane Quaisser [7], Jörg Overmann 2, Stefan Simon [8]
Microbial fingerprints reveal interaction between museum objects, curators, and visitors
Microbial communities reside at the interface between humans and their environment. Whether the microbiome can be leveraged to gain information on human interaction with museum objects is unclear. To investigate this, we selected objects from the Museum für Naturkunde and the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin, Germany, varying in material and size. Using swabs, we collected 126 samples from natural and cultural heritage objects, which were analyzed through 16S rRNA sequencing. By comparing the microbial composition of touched and untouched objects, we identified a microbial signature associated with human skin microbes. Applying this signature to cultural heritage objects, we identified areas with varying degrees of exposure to human contact on the Ishtar gate and Sam'al gate lions. Furthermore, we differentiated objects touched by two different individuals. Our findings demonstrate that the microbiome of museum objects provides insights into the level of human contact, crucial for conservation, heritage science, and potentially provenance research.