Enhancing microbiome and metagenomics studies through reference standards
Microbiome studies are revealing new insights into human biology and disease. One challenge in exploring diverse microbial communities using high-throughput technologies, however, is reconstructing the microbial inhabitants and their interactions. The creation of bacterial standard collections or representative communities with known numbers and types of microbes could aid in determining the efficiency of experiments using microbial communities (e.g., nucleic acid extraction, sequence diversity) as well as in the data analysis and interpretation.
In this webinar, our speakers will discuss several recent efforts aimed at creating biological standards for microbial studies and the impact such standards can have on the reproducibility of metagenomics and microbiome studies.
In this webinar, you will gain insights on:
- The latest efforts to build microbiome/ metagenomics standard collections
- How standards can be applied to microbiome/ metagenomics experiments
- Specific examples of the impact that using bacterial standards can have in analyzing microbial communities and their compositions
Featured speakers:
Scott Tighe
University of Vermont
Scott Tighe is a Research Associate and the Manager of the Advanced Genomic Center at the Vermont Cancer Center in Burlington, Vermont. Tighe is also the scientific leader and founder of the Extreme Microbiome Project, a scientific effort to characterize microbial life from extreme environments around the globe. His primary interest is in the area of microbiome analysis using next-generation sequencing approaches.
Jason Kralj
National Institute of Science and Technology
Jason Karlj, who received a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a Researcher in the Complex Microbial Systems Group at NIST. One of Karlj’s major interests is the development of reference samples and collections that can better faciliate metagenomic and microbiome studies in the future.
Sarah Highlander
Craig Venter Institute
Sarah Highlander is an Adjunct Professor at the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, California. Highlander has been involved with international studies focused on exploring the human microbiome. She was a principal investigator for the NIH-funded Human Microbiome Project, where her team developed protocols for sample handling, nucleic acid extraction, and rRNA sequencing and analysis.
Sponsored by:
