Bioinformatics for Environmental Sequencing Course in Norway

Filipa Martins and Mafalda Galhardo went to Norway last month to attend the BIO9905MERG1 – Bioinformatics for Environmental Sequencing (DNA metabarcoding) course at the University of Oslo from 27th-31st of March 2017.

This is a five-day intensive course, organized by Prof. Håvard Kauserud (Oslo Mycology group, Oslo) and financially supported by NORBIS and the Norwegian Research Council. The teachers were Prof. Håvard Kauserud, Ramiro Logares (CSIC, Barcelona), Marie Davey (CIME, Oslo), Anders Krabberød (CIME, Oslo) and Torbjørn Rognes (BMI, Oslo). Teachers provided tutorials with commands for all the workflows and guidance for technical issues. Overall, they had a great expertise on this topic and were very helpful with all questions and doubts students had. The course was very well organized and presented.

The knowledge and skills obtained with this course allow Filipa Martins and Mafalda Galhardo to bring more expertise and training opportunities to the EnvMetaGen team, namely by introducing additional methods for the processing and analysis of environmental sequencing data. In concrete, the analyses workflows learnt during the course have a direct application to the data that we analyze, contributing to advance our current work.