Reception to follow in SAS Hall Atrium.

Recent advances in large scale sequencing of microbial DNA without culturing or isolation gives us easy and direct access to “wild” microbial metagenomes that are otherwise virtually impossible to study.  However, because these data sets are large and relatively unstructured, analyzing them requires advancing data science techniques that include both new conceptual approaches as well as substantial practical software engineering.

Our work has focused on data-intensive approaches to studying ecology and genomics of microbial genomes and “population” pan-genomes in environmental samples, using tools and approaches developed in our lab and in collaboration with others. We see many ways in which microbial genomes do not particularly resemble our naive expectations, which is leading us into some productive confusion around known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns in environmental microbial systems.

Our work relies heavily on novel methods and technical infrastructure development. In this talk I will present a series of vignettes on our techniques and some of the results, aimed at a general scientific audience.