ONLINE COURSE – Introduction to Metabarcoding and Metagenomics Analysis (IMAM01) This course will be delivered live

Metabarcoding and metagenomics study genetic material recovered from environmental samples. Both methods provide a comprehensive view of microbial communities which are present in various ecosystems. The ability to identify organisms from traces of genetic material in environmental samples has reshaped the way we see life on earth. Especially for microorganisms, metagenomic techniques have granted us unprecedented insight into the microbiome of animals and the environment more broadly

Metabarcoding and metagenomics are both methods to study the composition of these complex communities. Where metabarcoding focusses on looking at a single or a combination of marker genes,  metagenomics looks into everything within a community.

During this course we will look at the differences and similarities between these two methods. We explain how to process the data using both short and long reads data, we take a look at the pros and cons and some of the pitfalls. We will guide you through the different approaches to take when processing the data and walk you through using some of the tools which are considered to be golden standard in the field. You will have hands on experience processing real data.

By the end of the course, participants should:

• Understand the basic concepts behind metabarcoding and metagenomics
• Work with both short and long read data for both metabarcoding and metagenomics
• Be able to use Qiime2 and NanoClust for analysis of metabarcoding
• Know different methods (metaphlan, humann) for marker based taxonomic and functional annotation of metagenomics data
• Create and annotated metagenome assembled genomes (using megahit, checkm, gtdb-tk)
• Be able to annotated antibiotic resistance genes in metagenomics data