Workshop on the Analysis of Environmentally relevant Microorganisms and Comparative Genomics

Background

The sequencing of genomes and metagenomes has today become a standard technique in molecular biology. Nearly unlimited sequencing capacities exist worldwide provided on demand by e.g. the Joint Genome Institute, the Craig Venter Institute or Genoscope. After obtaining the sequences of an organism or community of interest for most investigators, without strong bioinformatics background, a question arises: „What should I do with it now?“. The analysis of thousand of genes and the comparison of the content with published information is far from being trivial and requires, besides the „Know-How“, a huge amount of computational power.

This situation is similar to what we focussed at MPI around 7 years ago when we got our first seven million AGCTs for the Planctomycete Rhodopirellula baltica sequenced. No „turn-key“ software systems was available that helped us to answer our biological questions. So, we decided to build up a genome analysis infrastructure and develop software solutions to investigate genome and metagenome data especially from environmentally relevant microorganisms and to compare the data with publicly available information.

With this mini-workshop we want to share our accumulated knowledge about gene-prediction, annotation and comparative genomics and pay respect to several requests by researchers that had asked us how they could analyse their recently obtained sequence information from their „hobby-horses“.

Agenda

The workshop will focus on:

* ORF-Prediction (Frank Oliver Glöckner)
* Auto-annotation of genomes (MicHanThi) (Christian Quast)
* Annotationsystems (GenDB) (Thierry Lombardot)
* Comparative genomics (jCOAST) and contextual information (genomesDB) (Michael Richter)

* Use-cases from actual projects: Comparative genomics of Planctomycetes and Bacteroidetes (Ivaylo Kostadinov)

Location

When: March 13, 2007
Time: 11:00 to approximate 17:00 h
Location: Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Seminarroom 4021 and PC-lab

If you are interested in participating, please send an e-mail to eu-workshops(at)mpi-bremen.de until the first of March.