Past Training

The South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity (SAIAB), in collaboration with DIPLOMICS, ran a training workshop aimed at upskilling researchers interested in Microbiome 16S rRNA metabarcoding research. The training focused on bacterial 16S rRNA metabarcoding; however, the fundamental techniques learned could be applied to other organisms and marker genes.

The training was held virtually and covered the following topics:

• Understanding the mechanisms and chemistry behind Next Generation Sequencing technologies used in microbiome studies

• General considerations in the design of sampling protocols and experimental approaches

• Generating metabarcoding libraries and multiplexing

• Dataset curation

• Generation of OTUs (Operational taxonomic units)

• Classification of sequence reads

• Data analyses: Species diversity indices, NMDS, PCoA (using R)