Strategies and Techniques for Analyzing Microbial Population Structures (STAMPS)

Course Description

Modern sequencing technologies enable comprehensive investigations of microbial communities, but generating large microbial datasets is often easier than analyzing them. STAMPS bridges the gap between data generation and knowledge generation, offering interdisciplinary training in bioinformatics and statistics to practitioners of molecular microbial ecology and genomics. Topics include: experimental design; processing raw data into genomic and functional units; annotation and reference databases; and statistical methods for analyzing microbiome data. Hands-on tutorials will focus on short-read shotgun sequencing and 16S data, but other approaches (such as long-read sequencing and ITS sequencing) will be discussed. The course covers some basics of the Unix command-line and R statistical computing environments, but prior experience is strongly recommended. STAMPS promotes respectful dialogue and the exchange of ideas between experts and learners, and participants will have many opportunities to try out different analysis techniques and discuss their data and analyses with faculty. This hands-on, interactive course is designed for advanced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and established investigators from diverse biological fields.