Bioinformatics Workshop this Summer Filled to Capacity

This past summer the Bioinformatics Workshop was filled to capacity with interested students and faculty learning the skills to analyze and compare genomes. We were privileged to have Dr. Haibao Tang and Dr. Vivek Krishnakumar from the J. Craig Venter Institute on hand to start the workshop with the basics of supercomputing, and proceeding all the way through critical assessment of genomic assemblies. Dr. Eric Lyons from the University of Arizona and co-PI of the iPlant Collaborative spent an entire day via remote connection to show off the capabilities of the CoGe software (Comparative Genomics, part of genomevolution.org: https://genomevolution.org/CoGe/).  Dr. Joshua Orvis, a bioinformatician with many hats including the University of Maryland Bioinformatics Center, Adjunct at Johns Hopkins, and also on staff at the BROAD Institute who gave amazing lectures on metagenomics and the microbiome. We should all be proud that OSU has the National XSEDE Genomics Champion; Brian Cougar, a graduate student in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics in Dr. Elshaid's laboratory. Brian gave us a tour of his Trinnotate software, installed on our Cowboy Supercomputer, which has become one of the most respected annotation software available anywhere. Finally Dr. Peter Hoyt filled in with some lectures on the Atmosphere Cloud computing environment, and with Dr Dana Brunson kept OSU's system purring along, and prowled the crowd helping each student as they had questions along the way.

Many thanks go out to other OSU folks who help with "shoulder-surfing" and answering questions when they could, and again to Dr Brunson for getting the computer lab at Bennett set up and ready to go.

The Workshop lectures and exercises can be found at: https://pods.iplantcollaborative.org/wiki/display/Events/2014+OSU+Workshop

We need to thank our Sponsors:

The Bioinformatics Certificate Graduate Program, The Entangled Genomes Program, The OSU High Performance Computing Center, The Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and the OSU Foundation. Special Thanks go to the J. Craig Venter Institute and to the iPlant Collaborative for working with us to make this event a success. We are already planning next year!