BIT 477/577: Metagenomics
Overview:
- 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 communty 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
- Use of QIIME for diversity analyses