Environmental Metagenomics (Virtual Course)

Metagenomics is a widely used tool for the analysis of microbial communities as it gives access to the genomes of uncultured microorganisms.  Particularly in complex ecosystems (e.g. soil), currently uncultured taxa typically comprise a large fraction of the microbial communities.  Metagenomics has many benefits compared to amplicon sequencing, as it gives information not only on the taxonomic diversity but also on the functional composition of microbial communities.  Recent bioinformatic developments now allow the recovery of metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) at an incredible depth.  During this one week course you will learn state-of-the-art bioinformatic approaches to analyse metagenomic data.  We will cover both read- and assembly-based methods, focusing on the strenght of each of these methods depending on the research question.  We will use data from both short- (e.g. Illumina) and long-read (e.g. Nanopore) sequencing platforms, as it improves dramatically MAG assembling and binning compared to short-read-only methods.  Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, this course will be held online.