We live in a microbiology renaissance fueled by the realization of the importance of microbial communities in aspects spanning from agriculture and environment to human health and well been. The investigation of those communities was made possible through advances in sequencing technologies that enabled researchers to obtain detailed views in the microbial communities’ structure and function without the need for cultivation. Those, now affordable, technologies are responsible for an unprecedented amount of data flow that quickly surpass our computational and analytic capacity. More and more, the need for reliable, quick and user-friendly bioinformatic solutions for biologists is becoming apparent. To address this need we develop a set of straightforward R scripts to assist non-bioinformaticians in routine analytical steps. This set of scripts, called Rhea, allow users with targeted metagenomic data (usually amplicons of the 16S gene) to perform tasks like calculating alpha and beta diversity, identify microbes with differential abundances across groups and detecting correlation among taxa and external variables. In this workshop, we will cover the theoretical basis of such analytical steps and most importantly offer hands-on training in following such pipelines. The scripts are designed in such a way that no previous knowledge of programming in R is required.The MBK8 workshop will be held on the 18th April 2019 from 09:00 - 15:00. Number of maximum participants 25. Registration Fee: 30 €.
This course is suitable for postgraduate wet-lab researchers at any career stage who are working with and/or generating their own metagenomics datasets.
Participants will require a basic knowledge of the Unix command line, and the R statistical packages.
All applicants should fill the online application form.