The 2017 Institute of Bioinformatics annual symposium on Monday, September 25 focuses on the structured ecological community that regulates how the Earth functions in practically every way, from energy consumption to respiration:

the microbiome, a collective term for the multitude of microbial communities that form critical components of biological systems ranging from human health to agriculture and the environment. Microbiome research frequently involves complex datasets, with a wide variety of organisms interacting at different spatial, temporal, and taxonomic scales. Parsing the Microbiome will feature several prominent experts who are developing or applying bioinformatics tools to understand these data and condense them into interpretable results. This one-day symposium will be useful to students, postdocs, and faculty interested in microbiome research and the current leading methods in this field.

One of the most profound breakthroughs in fundamental science in the last twenty years, understanding how microbes in the human gut keep us healthy and how marine microbes work as a part of a vast biological network in the oceans represent analagous advances that are at once fascinating and key to the optimal functioning of these systems. Research on the many aspects of the microbiome represents an extraodinary data challenge for usage, storage, analysis and accessibility. Many of our best faculty members and students are working in these areas, and the Institute of Bioinformatics has done them all a service by bringing in renowned experts from around world to interact with them. Register here.