2023•08•28     Venezuela

We are glad to announce the Course “Latin American Training on the Microbiological Diagnosis and Genomic Data Analysis using Bioinformatics”. This event is coordinated by Dr Esperanza Briceño, Instituto Nacional de Higiene Rafael Rangel, Venezuela, from November 13th to November 17th, 2023.

The detection of pathogenic microorganisms is important to minimize the risk of suffering from foodborne illnesses. The microbiological content of drinking water and food is traditionally determined by employing culture-dependent methods that cannot detect all microorganisms, especially those that are not culturable. Thus, the natural microbiota of water and food can now be determined more accurately and analyzed in significantly greater detail, providing a comprehensive understanding of the microbial community applicable to public health.

The continuous development of sequencing platforms integrated into genomic research as Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) allows endless, large-scale studies using genomic information has become a computational activity, analyzing enormous amounts of data that require storage and processing, overcoming the capacity of common software, becoming Big Data the “bottleneck” in the current genomic era. In this sense, bioinformatics, which applies informatics to manage, store, and analyse genomic data, plays an important role.

We have organized a Latin-American training on Microbiological Diagnosis and Genomic Data Analysis using Bioinformatics, to train Latin-American professionals further working in life sciences or related areas of research involved in generating and/or data analysis from NGS for assembly and annotation of genomes.

The course is organized in 5 days. The training starts with a one-day symposium with international and national invited speakers giving four conferences:

• Updating the Molecular techniques for the identification of pathogenic microorganisms in food or water
• Methods of isolation of microorganism genome in food and water
• Massive Sequencing and Molecular Epidemiology Uses” Assembly and annotation of genomes and metagenomics,
• Computer tools for the analysis of genomic data and approaches to the analysis of genomic data in the countries of the region and the world.

The symposium closes with an afternoon poster session where the 20 participants will present their research work at their home institutions.

The next four days of the course are organized into theoretical and practical sessions dedicated to Generation Sequencing Technologies and applications, quality control of sequencing reads, basic statistics of short sequence reads, types of metagenomes, microbial diversity and amplicon sequencing experimental design and preprocessing, assembly and annotation, in charge of BSc Rafael Puche and Jessica Vivas, we will also have the participation of PhD Marwan Aguilar, Martha Bravo, Carlos Aponte, Carlos Ramirez, Manuel Moya, Fernando Hernandez, Ascanio Rojas and Geber Peña, specialists with extensive experience in handling tools for genomic data analysis, molecular biology. Also, we will have the presence of 2 international experts in bioinformatics analysis in implementation surveillance, prevention, control and eradication of zoonotic and foodborne/waterborne diseases.

The main aim of the course is to train Latin-American professionals in molecular techniques and genomic data analysis using bioinformatics to detect foodborne and waterborne microorganisms.

The Open Call is open to anyone interested.

Applicants must apply by emailing cursogenomicaunubiolac@gmail.com.

Deadline:  September 30th, 2023

More information on the website.

Download the flyer here.