Achievement

The second year students have carried out analyses of microbial metagenomic sequence data to be presented in a manuscript being prepared this summer (2013). The data being analyzed were collected from the work accomplished in first year of support (2011-2012) involving environmental metagenomic sequencing of a polluted and clean creek of the PIE-LTER station. Year two focused on data management and computational analyses given the tremendous complexity they uncovered in their sequence survey. They have used the MG-RAST platform for initial screening of microbial diversity. This will parse the data by phylogenetic and gene family identification. The relative counts of each identifiable gene sequenced in the different stations along the polluted and clean creeks is the main goal. As of this writing, those tabulations are still in process. Two of the trainees, one from a biology background and one from an applied math background, had no prior expertise with this analysis platform.