Category: Workshops

I have had the pleasure to be chosen as a speaker for next week’s (ten days from now) Swedish Bioinformatics Workshop. My talk is entitled “Turn up the signal – wipe out the noise: Gaining insights into bacterial community functions using metagenomic data“, and will largely deal with the same questions as my talk on EDAR3 in May this year. As then, the talk will highlight the some particular pitfalls related to interpretation of data, and exemplify how flawed analysis practices can result in misleading conclusions regarding community function, and use examples from our studies of environments subjected to pharmaceutical pollution in India, the effect of travel on the human resistome, and modern municipal wastewater treatment processes.

The talk will take place on Thursday, September 24, 2015 at 16:30. The full program for the conference can be found here. And also, if you want a sneak peak of the talk, you can drop by on Friday 13.00 at Chemistry and Molecular Biology, where I will give a seminar on the same topic in the Monthly Bioinformatic Practical Meetings series.

One of the highlights of the Swedish Bioinformatics Workshop 2014 was of course the dinner entertainment, a song specially crafted for the event. It has now, fortunately, been put online. For anyone who might not catch all the words, here’s the complete lyrics for the song (which is based on the song “Java Jive” in the Manhattan Transfer arrangement):

The Bioinformatics ABC

Grab your coffee
Grab your tea
Put down your spoon now and listen to me
For the bioinformatics ABC
Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up
(Boy)

A for ABYSS
B for BLAST
And C for Clustal, though it’s not that fast
Alternatives are Muscle and MAFFT
ABYSS and BLAST and Clustal, Muscle, MAFFT
(Yeah)

D count reads with DESeq or E for EdgeR
And F for FastQC and G for GLIMMER
H for HMMER using Markov Chains
(Explain)
Hidden hidden Markov model

I for Inchworm;
Jellyfish
Add Chrysalis and Butterfly and wish
Assemble fast with a sound that goes swish
Contig, contig, contig, contig, transcript
(Girl)

KBASE
Lasergene
And the ton of tools for metagenomics
MEGAN, Megraft,
MetaPhlan, MG-RAST, Meta-GeneMark
And that’s just mentioning a few of them
(Talk it boy)

N for Newbler, old-school it is
If you’re still using 454 it’s a bliss
O for Oases, P for PyroNoise
45-45-45-454-454

Q is for Quake for that great quality
And R is for all those neat statistics
S for the Spades assembler, oh yeah

T for TopHat
U for Uclust
V for Velvet

There is Wham to align
XMatchView to review
And YASS to pursue
(But do you)
Know any tools beginning with Z?
What?
Yeah, Zorro, Zorro, Zorro
Oh yeah

I would like to bring your attention to that the abstract deadline for the Swedish Bioinformatics Workshop held in Gothenburg in October has been extended to September 15. So hurry on and contribute with your latest research, we look forward to get to know what you’re doing!

I am part of the organizing committee for the Swedish Bioinformatics Workshop (#SBW2014) that will be held October 23-24 this year in Gothenburg. I would like to invite you all, especially master/PhD students and PostDocs in Sweden, to come and share the event with us!

SBW is an annual event that has been organized by the different universities in Sweden. This year it will take place at the Wallenberg Conference Centre in Gothenburg and is arranged by both University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology. SBW2014 will, as the tradition abides, be a meeting point for PhD students and postdocs working with any kind of bioinformatics within Sweden and is therefore free of charge for these groups. We are proud to announce a program including both invited speakers – such as Mick Watson from the Roslin institute, Dawn Field from University of Oxford, and Joakim Lundeberg from KTH – along with participant presentations and poster sessions. This year, the program will also contain a number of workshop sessions where hands-on problems will be used as starting points for discussions on new bioinformatics approaches to these problems. This will provide opportunities for attendees with different methodological backgrounds to interact and work together to find synergies between fields and come up with creative solutions.

More information about the event including registration and abstract submission can be found at www.sbw2014.se.

I, and the rest of the organizers, look forward to meeting you in Gothenburg in October!

Webpage: http://www.sbw2014.se

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1450513325188910/

Google+: https://plus.google.com/events/cuhlpovcc275stut854dk5ussnk

If you want, you can spread the word, for example using this flyer!

Science for Life Laboratories (SciLifeLab) in Stockholm will host a metagenome data analysis workshop on May 21-23, in which I will participate as a tutorial assistant. Additionally, our group leader Joakim Larsson will be giving a lecture about how we use metagenomics to assess the environmental reservoir of antibiotic resistance genes (much of my recent work will likely go into that). I hope to meet you there, so don’t forget to register!

Confirmed speakers:
Lex Nederbragt, Oslo University, Norway
Saskia Smits, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands
Joakim Larsson, Göteborg University, Sweden
Paul Wilmes, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Anders Andersson, SciLifeLab, Sweden
Noan Le Bescot, UPMC (Tara expedition), France

The workshop is part of the AllBio Bioinformatics initiative.

Those of you attending the Swedish Bioinformatics Workshop, this year given in Skövde, will have a chance seeing me talk about how sequencing depth influences the picture we get of the environmental resistance gene diversity. I think the topic is very urgent and interesting, and will likely come back to it in a more thorough blog post later. There are also a few other very interesting talks, for example about metagenomic gene quantification, and en masse sequencing of E. coli and H. pylori isolates. I think all attendants are in for a treat! See you there!

Those attending the Metagenomics lab (part of the basic NGS course for PhD students given at GU this week), can find the material for the lab on this page:
https://microbiology.se/ngs-metagenomics-lab/
Of course, the page is open for anyone else as well, although you won’t get the support that the GU students are given.

The newly formed bioinformatics network for PhD students in Gothenburg (GoBiG), will have an introductory meeting next week, on thursday the 26th at Chalmers. See this page for more info.

For those of you who are not already fed up with my writings on biology stuff on the web site, two opportunities to hear me talk in real life has popped up in May. The first is already on May 2nd, on the Open Day in Life Sciences, arranged by the Science Faculty at the University of Gothenburg. I will talk about the search for detoxification systems in metagenomic sequence data (from a collections point of view, as that is the theme for the day). There will also be an opportunity be guided in the herbarium and the botanical garden, plus having lunch and an optional after-work drink at Botaniska Paviljongen. But hurry, last day of admission is tomorrow! Register here.

The second opportunity will be at the SocBiN-2011 bioinformatics conference in Helsinki, on the 12th of May. I will present in the session called “Bioinformatics of Metagenomics”, and talk about a software tool for rRNA classification. I really look forward to this Bioinformatics conference, there are a number of highly prominent and interesting speakers, and I have heard that Helsinki in May is very beautiful. Besides, I am going there with extremely nice people, adding up to potentially being the best biology venue I will attend this spring.

I will present my master thesis “Metagenomic Analysis of Marine Periphyton Communities”, on Tuesday the 22nd of March, at 13.00. The presentation will take place in the room Folke Andreasson at Medicinaregatan 11 in Gothenburg. The presentation is open for everyone, but the number of seats are limited.