On October 13 – 15, 2021, ISB will host a virtual course and symposium on the latest cutting edge microbiome research.

ISB is hosting a series of events in October of 2021 that highlight recent advances toward understanding general patterns of commensal population genomic variation within the human gut, how fine-scale commensal genomic variation is influenced by host phenotypic variation, and whether or not commensal genomic variation has an impact on human health and disease.

Course participants will need to register below in order to receive a Zoom link and an invitation to the course’s Slack account. Lectures will be given in Zoom and real-time tutorials will be monitored by teaching assistants via Slack. Thus, participants will need to install both Zoom and Slack prior to the start of the course. Presentations and course materials can be accessed on the course’s GitHub repository (coming soon). Course presentations can be viewed on a web browser (smartphone compatible). Course tutorials will be run in ipython notebooks within Google Colab, which provides all participants with free computational resources, but will also require everyone to sign up for a Google account (if they do not already have one). The first half of the course will be run using Quantitative Insights Into Microbial Ecology 2 (QIIME2). The second half of the course will involve building genome-scale metabolic models for individual bacterial isolates to map genomic variation onto ecological niche space.