Wednesday 23 April 2014 at 3:00pm

Title: “Characterization of microbial communities through multiplexed amplicon sequencing”

Speaker: James R. White, Ph.D.
Founder, Resphera Biosciences

Abstract:
The last decade has seen a revolution in the development of culture-independent methods for characterizing the inherent diversity and taxonomic composition of complex microbial environments, particularly through utilization of universal primer sets to amplify conserved regions within the 16S and 18S rRNA genes, as well as the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region.

The concurrent advancement of high-throughput next-generation DNA sequencing technologies (e.g., Roche/454, Illumina MiSeq) has greatly enhanced our ability to perform large-scale and cost-effective amplicon studies by multiplexing many samples on a single sequencing run.

In this talk, I aim to provide a practical overview of amplicon-based study design and the current challenges and limitations associated with analysis of the data. I will further illustrate the utility of the MiSeq platform by discussing results of a recent collaboration to characterize the bacterial and fungal diversity of the tomato plant and to evaluate environmental drivers of plant surface microbial community structure.

Host: Tsvetan Bachvaroff, Ph.D.