Wrap up of the #SMBEeuks meeting and QIIME workshop at UC Davis

Thanks to everyone who attended the SMBE Satellite Meeting on Eukaryotic -Omics at UC Davis last week (April 29 - May 2, 2013). The event was a resounding success - it was wonderful to meet participants from such diverse backgrounds, working on different aspects of eukaryotic genomics and biodiversity studies. Many thanks to meeting sponsors SMBE, MOBIO and Illumina for their generous financial support. Fingers crossed for other similar meetings in the future! 

For reference, all meeting documents are available here:

• Meeting program PDF
• Abstract book PDF
• List of registered participants (Names, e-mails, affiliations, and Twitter usernames)

Twitter discussions that took place at the meeting each day have been compiled using Storify (a great online tool that collects tweets before Twitter locks them away in their archive):

• #SMBEeuks - Day 1 Storify (compiled by Jonathan Eisen)
• #SMBEeuks - Day 2 Storify (compiled by Jonathan Eisen)
• #SMBEeuks - Days 3 and 4 Storify (complied by Holly Bik) 

Some speakers have posted their slides online - hopefully I can expand this list as I convince more participants to share their talks and posters (updated 5/18):

• Meeting welcome and overview of Eukaryotic -Omics at UC Davis - Holly Bik
• The need for a phylogeny-driven genomic encyclopedia of Eukaryotes (slides only) - Jonathan Eisen (alternate YouTube link here - for slides and recorded audio)
• The pro-shotgun-assembly talk - C. Titus Brown
• Predicting loci of functional evolution within ancestral genes - Victor Hanson-Smith
• Composition of the Maize Endophytic Microbiome is Correlated with Maize Genotype - Surya Saha
• Next-generation sequencing for microbial ecology: alpha diversity, beta diversity, and biases in high-throughput sequencing - Rachel Adams
• Host-associated eukaryotic communities - Laura Wegener Parfrey

On Thursday morning we held breakout group sessions to discuss the overall themes at the #SMBEeuks meeting, and put forward some recommendations for increasing the pace of scientific progress in Eukaryotic -Omics fields. A general discussion took place before we broke off into two smaller groups for more specific discussions. Notes are posted here:

• Breakout questions and notes from the general group discussion (PDF)
• "Amplicon group" breakout notes (PDF)
• "Genomes group" breakout notes (PDF)

Finally, my deepest thanks to Laura Wegener Parfrey, Tony Walters, and Adam Robbins-Pianka for running a fantastic QIIME workshop after the #SMBEeuks meeting. We had a packed room of eager biologists who were ready to pick up some command line expertise. QIIME workshop documents are posted below - additional thanks to microBEnet and the Alfred P. Sloan foundation who supported this workshop!

• QIIME workshop agenda
• List of participants at QIIME workshop (names, e-mails and affiliations)

International Research Coordination Network for Biodiversity of Ciliates

I was browsing through this NSF report on Dimensions of Biodiversity Projects 2010-2012, and I stumbled across this project which I had no idea even existed!

Upon further investigation, I discovered that this ciliates RCN has a portal website (including a document listing "Grand Challenges" in the study of ciliates). The inaugural meeting took place in September 2012 at NESCent, so it looks like the RCN is still in the early stages.

Frustratingly, the website doesn't seem to have been updated in quite a while (May 2012), so there isn't much new information about workshop outcomes or upcoming RCN activities. I'm excited to keep tabs on this new community - the discussions and outputs will be very relevant to high-throughput environmental sequencing approaches.