Microbial Genomics & Metagenomics Workshops

MGM Workshop Registration now open!

Early bird rates are available until January 15, 2025. 
Join us on April 28-May 2, 2025 at the
Integrative Genomics Building (Bldg 91), Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

Register here

Registration fees for the five-day course at LBNL:

• $550 – Academic/LBNL Staff
• $800 – Industry/Non-Academic

About this Workshop

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI) is offering a five-day workshop on Microbial Genomics and Metagenomics. This highly hands-on workshop is designed to familiarize users with the Integrated Microbial Genomes & Microbiomes (IMG/M) data and workflows for computational analysis and interpretation of sequence data. IMG/M is a web-based platform that provides access to the wealth of public microbiome sequence data and enables the user to analyze these data with existing bioinformatic methods to bridge the gap from sequence to biology.

Users will complete hands-on exercises involving comparative analysis, visualization and interpretation of genomic and metagenomic datasets. They will apply these workflows to individual or group projects and present findings. The workshop also includes brief overviews of sequencing, assembly, metadata curation, annotation, as well as some presentations from the JGI’s portfolio of products beyond sequencing such as DNA synthesis, metabolomics, single cell technology, and more.

Learn more about IMG/M’s capabilities by watching our introductory video.

Who this workshop is for

This course is primarily aimed at benchtop or experimental biologists and budding computational biologists that wish to learn how to use the IMG resources for (meta)genome exploration, comparative genomics and gene discovery, as well as for viral ecogenomics.

Attendees are expected to have some basic understanding of microbiology, biochemistry or molecular biology, and computational biology concepts (e.g., multiple sequence alignment, phylogenetic tree construction). More information on these topics can be found in Richardson & Watson (2012) and Sharpton (2014). Although this workshop centers on computational topics, no programming knowledge is required; all exercises will be performed using the IMG web user interface.

If you are primarily interested in fungal and algal or plant genomes, we encourage you to explore the JGI’s other dedicated portals, MycoCosm or PhycoCosm or Phytozome, respectively, and inquire for training opportunities through the Fungal & Algal and Plant programs. Although IMG/M integrates a large number of fungal, algal and plant genomes, these are included primarily to support comparative analysis of microbial genomes.

Previous Workshops

• Previous Microbial Genomics & Metagenomics Workshops 

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