Hands-on Session on Metagenome Assembly and Binning

Description: Bioinformatics is a multidisciplinary field that develops methods for turning the so-called ‘biological big data’ into knowledge. Although most problems in biology are not as embarrassingly parallelizable as the physics codes that HPC systems are usually designed for, this has been starting to change in recent years. Metagenomics is an emerging field in bioinformatics that investigates microbes inhabiting oceans, soils, human body, etc. with sequencing technologies.

In this one-day hands-on session, a typical metagenomics pipeline will be explored to introduce common tools used in bioinformatics analysis and how they can be utilized in an HPC environment.

Instructor: Armin Sobhani, SHARCNET, University of Ontario Institute of Technology.

Prerequisites: Basic Unix competence and basic knowledge of bioinformatics applications are required.