Seminars & Events

Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology
"Ultra-high-Throughput Microbial Ecology: Software, Sequencing and Practice for Studying Tens of Thousands of Environments"

DATE: October 5, 2011 to October 5, 2011
TIME: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
SPEAKER: Dr. J. Gregory Caporaso, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Northern Arizona University
LOCATION: Building 240, Conference Room 4301, Argonne National Laboratory
HOST: Dr. Folker Meyer

Description:
Microbial ecology is an exciting and rapidly growing area of biology, with almost weekly publications in Science, Nature, PNAS, and even popular literature sources such as The New York Times. This field also exemplifies the increasingly data-intensive nature of modern Biology: a single study can easily generate greater than 80 gigabytes of raw sequence data and is therefore multidisciplinary by requirement. In this talk, Dr. Caporaso will present his recent work on increasing the scale on which microbial ecology is possible, both in terms of breadth (the types of communities that can be profiled in high-throughput) and depth (the amount of data that can feasibly be collected and analyzed). In particular he will talk about his work on the QIIME (Quantitative Insights Into Microbial Ecology; www.qiime.org) software package and on developing a community sequencing protocol for the Illumina sequencing technologies. These tools have made it possible to increase the scale of these studies by about 2000x in just two years without increasing the cost per sequence. Dr. Caporaso will conclude by presenting several projects that illustrate what is possible in ultra-high-throughput microbial ecology: for example, a timeseries analysis of the human microbiome profiling four body sites from two individuals with daily sampling for up to 18 months.

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