Bioplatforms Australia – CSIRO Metagenomics Workshop (February 6-7, 10-11 2014)

Bioplatforms Australia and CSIRO conducted an “Introduction to Metagenomics” workshop last February 6-7, 2014 at University of New South Wales and February 10-11, 2014 at Monash University. The workshop was aimed for bench biologies with no or little experience in Bioinformatics using publicly available data resources and toolsets.

As per previous Bioplatforms Australia workshops, the Metagenomics workshop was delivered using the Monash node of the NeCTAR Research Cloud infrastructure – R@CMon. Cloud provisioning tools used in previous workshops have been reused to provide a seamless virtual desktop training platform.

The R@CMon team worked with Bioplatforms Australia, CSIRO and EMBL-EBI in producing an appropriate cloud image and toolset for the workshop. Some of the tools used in the workshop are QIIME, FastQC, and InterProScan.

Given the success and popularity of the training, R@CMon has begun work with Bioplatforms Australia and other nodes of the NeCTAR Research Cloud to scale the training environment with trainees as they progress from taking the course, to taking the training environment home with them, to preparing for production genomics facilities.

The trainees have the following to say about the 2-days workshop:

“Everyone is very helpful and the content was clear and concise. I thank everyone for getting this program up and running and I would definitely like to return for similar courses.”

“Definitely a fantastic & informative 2-days. I definitely feel that most of what I learned today can be directly applied to the molecular work I am currently engaged in.”

“Good amount of hands on to actually see what happens during the analysis of big data, most of what was taught was very clear and concise. good range of programs were used, only wish there was more time to go through more analyses.”

“I strongly recommend this as a complete course for students or beginners in NGS analyses.  i think the first metagenomic workshop is a winner.”

“Definitely this course has provided me a great basis to look at future data sets.”

“Well ran, good materials, virtual machine made life easy.”

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