Physalia Course on Eukaryotic Metabarcoding in Berlin, Germany

Sara Sampaio from our team has returned from this fantastic training that provided insights about laboratory methods used when dealing with eDNA and about different pipelines that could be used to process eDNA metabarcoding data. The first day was mainly theoretical, about eDNA lab procedures and how to design primers. The remaining days, were composed by an initial theoretical lecture that provided the background for the computational practical session in the afternoon. The participants included a few graduate students and several researches with different know-how, but that intended to learn more about the bioinformatics analyses of eDNA data. In total, there were about 20 participants from about 10 countries.

The major output from this course was to understand the full potential of metabarcoding. It also allowed the participants to learn how to run complete metabarcoding pipelines for obtaining diversity inventories and ecologically interpretable data from raw next-generation sequencing and increased the know-how on bioinformatic data analysis and planning of laboratory work.

During the lunch and dinner, it was possible to contact with different attendees of the course and share knowledge. It was very rewarding to talk and learn with Dr. Vasco Elbrecht, a junior working group leader in Environmental Genomics, Centre for Molecular Biodiversity Research and Daniel Marquina, a PhD student at the Swedish Museum of Natural History.