Having a great time at the Museum Genomics in Practice workshop organised by Craig Moritz and the team at the Centre for Biodiversity Analysis. Excellent line-up of speakers covering genomics, bioinformatics and application.

The purpose of the workshop is to share practicioners' knowledge on how we get next-gen sequencing data from samples of diverse types and quality into bioinformatics piplelines to answer interesting questions.

The focus is on high-throughput and cost-effective phylogenomic, population genetic and multilocus barcoding/RNAseq data, rather than full genome sequencing and assembly.

Speakers are drawn from museums internationally (e.g. Lydia Smith from MVZ, Berkeley), national museums and botanic gardens, Atlas of Living Australia, CSIRO, a range of universities and companies like Diversity Arrays Technology (DArT Pty Ltd), BioPlatforms Australia, NECTAR, and Research Data Services.

Q&A

The IAE presence included Arthur Georges and Bernd Gruber (announcing their new package dartR), PhD student Meghan Castelli, and adjunct Clare Holleley.

Amazing diversity of work going on, and some incredible challenges ahead for bringing the new sequencing and bioinformatics tools to bear on understanding our biodiverity and its historical and contemporary drivers.

The outline and program for the workshop is available online.