SIMBA and de.NBI Metagenomics Workshop 2021

At the start of February (3^rd-5^th) SIMBA partners from UNIBI and UCPH hosted a metagenomics workshop in collaboration with de.NBI. Held online, the hands-on workshop was aimed at anyone looking to learn more about analysing shotgun metagenomics data.

Shotgun metagenomics sequencing is a methodology used by microbiologists, to identify all the genes of all organisms in a given sample. It can be used to identify emerging diseases or to gain insights into the diversity of a microbial community in an environment. The workshop addressed the steps involved in carrying out an analysis, including: pre-processing, assembly, binning and statistical analysis. Additionally, there was an introduction to the metagenomics pipeline developed at UNIBI.

The workshop was very well received and attended by researchers from all over the world. In total 23 researchers, from 20 different institutions in 15 different countries took part. Due to the hand’s on nature of the workshop, the number of participants was limited to ensure each person received the necessary time with the instructors. As many of the participants had limited experience with these types of analyses before attending the workhop, de.NBI held a pre-workshop day to do a crash course in the systems that would be used during the workshop, including UNIX and R. We would like to thank all those involved in organising the workshop for hosting this very successful event.

There are more workshops and training courses planned by the SIMBA consortium for 2021. Stay tuned to our website and Twitter channel for updates.

Figure 1. Map showing location of participants. The Workshop was attended by researchers from 15 different countries