Participants will be introduced to a variety of methods for studying the complex microbial populations that surround us, including applications, limitations, and health and legal implications.
Students will apply high-throughput sequencing techniques to mine the genetic diversity of complex populations such as the community of microbes growing happily in a kitchen sink.
Lectures:
Introduction to metagenomics and microbial communities
Exploiting genome sequencing for drug and biotechnology product discovery
Approaches and limitations of metagenomic surveys
Analyzing and visualising metagenomic data (R and online tools for sequence analysis)
Labs:
Isolation of DNA from student-selected microbial community and preparation (Q/C) for high-throughput sequencing
Assembly and gene annotation of sequence data from microbial community using cloud computing
Use of bioinformatics software for analyses of metagenomic surveys
Use of cloud-based pipelines for analyzing 16S sequences
