Federal Project Grant Award Summary

Vanderbilt University Medical Center received a $433,985 Project Grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) under the Biomedical Research and Research Training program (CFDA 93.859), awarded March 15, 2026, with completion targeted for December 31, 2030. The award supports the development of advanced statistical methods and quantitative methodologies to address critical data analysis gaps in microbiome research. Specifically, the research lab will benchmark unmeasured confounding effects in microbiome studies using diverse real-world data and develop specialized latent factor modeling techniques to improve false discovery control and enable robust findings in large-scale microbiome association studies.

Additionally, the project will leverage breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and genomic large language models (LLMs) to address challenges associated with sparse and under-annotated microbial gene profiles generated by modern bioinformatics. The research will utilize functional dependency structures encoded by genomic LLMs to create putatively functional orthologs of microbial genes, enabling meaningful aggregation of sparse "dark-matter" genes to increase interpretability and statistical power in downstream microbiome analytics. These methodological advances are designed to support the broader human microbiome research community by providing rigorous and practical statistical tools for next-generation microbiome data analysis.