iPlant Events at PAG XXIV

iPlant invites you to take part in user-oriented events taking place across several days at this year's Plant and Animal Genome Meeting.

Saturday, January 9^th

Workshop Description

Cyberinfrastructure developed by iPlant Collaborative makes it possible for large numbers of students and educators to effectively use computation in research and teaching. This session showcases ways iPlant has advanced learning from high school to post-graduate contexts. Talks on DNA Subway (www.dnasubway.org) demonstrate how thousands of students have been able to use wet-lab and bioinformatics activities to explore species identification through DNA barcoding (Blue Line) as well as differential gene expression through RNA-Seq (Green Line). Metagenomics has exciting potential for student learning and course-based research (CUREs); we will cover classroom examples using iPlant’s Discovery Environment which will serve as the basis for new DNA Subway-style microbial/metagenomics workflows. Data Science is a tremendously important skill for genomics and iPlant’s collaboration with Data Carpentry (www.datacarpentry.org) has produced new lesson materials for Next-generation sequence data. Finally, iPlant is centered on democratizing access to resources – we discuss a vision for broadening participation and impacts that focus on reaching Native American / American Indian / Alaskan Native communities.

Organizer: Jason Williams, Dave Micklos - CSHL DNA Learning Center/ iPlant

Speakers

Workshop Description

iPlant Collaborative has developed cyberinfrastructure (access to software and data management tools, HPC, and support) that enables data-intensive biology. This informal user meeting is designed to get you informed and using the most recent capabilities of the platform. Particular highlights of this session will include the latest work on the iPlant Data Commons and its role reproducibility and discoverability, iPlant’s SRA submission pipeline. We will also have demos  on data sharing and management, and popular products for genome assembly, annotation, and RNA-Seq. Whether you are a long-time iPlant user, or are just getting introduced, we invite you to stop by, ask questions, or just say hello!

Organizer: Jason Williams

Sunday, January 10^th

• iPlant Booth #503 (Open from 3:00PM - 8:30PM)

Workshop Description

At this iPlant user meeting, we will cover some of resources for bringing your own tools and workflows to iPlant platforms. We will have several informal presentations as well as hands on guidance and demos. The session focus will be on tool installation as well as working with image/phenotype data, however we will provide help for all iPlant related questions.

Organizer: Nirav Merchant, Matthew Vaughn, Jason Williams

Talks:

Monday, January 11th

• iPlant Booth #503 (Open from 9:30AM - 5:00PM)

Workshop Description

This workshop is for biologists who are working with large datasets. It will feature talks, tutorials, and demos that will help you use free, NSF-funded resources developed by the iPlant Collaborative (#DBI-1265383) for a variety of data-intensive analyses (e.g. genome assembly and annotation, RNA-Seq, image analysis, GWAS, geospatial etc.). Users with limited bioinformatics experience, or experienced users who need access to greater HPC capacity will both benefit from attending. The workshop will feature an overview of available resources (data storage/sharing, web interfaces, cloud computing), presentations by researchers who have used these tools to solve problems, and how tool developers can make their tools and pipelines more accessible to the research community.

Organizer: Jason Williams - Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory / iPlant

Speakers

Workshop Description