Friday, April 29, 2011

iEVOBIO Coming soon (6/20-21): Metagenomics, Biodiversity, Barcoding, Data Integration, and more

Last year, iEVOBIO was a fun, interesting meeting for many reasons (not the least of which is that I was the keynote speaker).  If you want to learn more about last years meeting check out my blog post: Summary of #iEVOBIO Day 1 #evolution #phylogenetics #informatics #opensource

But I note, that meeting was so, well, last year.  This year, the meeting is focusing on metagenomics, barcoding and biodiversity as well as data integration (see the meeting website for more information: iEvoBio: Home).  From the website:



In 2011 iEvoBio will have a a special focus session on metagenomics, barcoding, and biodiversity and the challenges that these new approaches raise for evolutionary informaticians. We now have over 6000 genomes and vast quantities of metagenomic sequences in the public domain, primarily from bacteria and archaea from many habitats. Various short sequences (e.g. barcodes) for quick identification of eukaryotes are emerging. The availability of this sequence data and ever-cheaper methods for producing it offer exciting opportunities for understanding molecular evolution and biodiversity. However, the data are growing faster than the infrastructure to support it. Thus there are informatics challenges for visualizing, analyzing, interpreting, and managing the data and the results from it. Moreover, the eukaryotic and microbial informatics communities have independent histories and approaches so synergy is not easy.

These challenges typify the intersection of fields that are the scope of iEvoBio. Speakers in this special session of iEvoBio will present their work and participate in a panel discussion. We will have 3 or 4 invited speakers at this session, including Neil Davies (Moorea Biocode project),Linda Amarral-Zettler (Marine Biological Laboratory Woods Hole), Holly Bik (Hubbard Center for Genome Studies, University of New Hampshire), and David Schindel (Barcode of Life, and Smithsonian Institution). After the talks, there will be an open panel discussion with all the speakers, including key note speaker Dawn Field (Center for Ecology and Hydrology at Oxford). We encourage you to attend this special session and participate in what we think will be a remarkably fruitful meeting.
Sounds pretty snazzy to me.  Plus, on top of all that, the meeting is very committed to Open Science:
iEvoBio and its sponsors are dedicated to promoting the practice andphilosophy of Open Source software development and reuse within the research community. For this reason, if a submitted talk concerns a specific software system for use by the research community, that software must be licensed with a recognized Open Source License, and be available for download, including source code, by a tar/zip file accessed through ftp/http or through a widely used version control system like cvs, Subversion, git, Bazaar, or Mercurial.
From an email I received:
More details about the program and guidelines for contributing content are available at http://ievobio.org.  You can also find continuous updates on the conference's Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/iEvoBio.

iEvoBio is sponsored by the US National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) in partnership with the Society for the Study of Ecolution (SSE) and the Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB). Additional support has been provided by the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL).

The iEvoBio 2011 Organizing Committee:
Rob Guralnick (University of Colorado at Boulder) (Co-chair)
Cynthia Parr (Encyclopedia of Life) (Co-chair)
Dawn Field (UK National Environmental Research Center)
Mark Holder (University of Kansas)
Hilmar Lapp (NESCent)
Rod Page (University of Glasgow)
Overall, it seems like this would be a good place to learn about the uses of high throughput sequencing in ecological and evolutionary studies.

(note - cross posting at http://www.microbe.net/2011/04/29/want-to-learn-what-eco-evo-types-are-doing-w-metagenomic-barcoding-data-go-to-ievobio-621-22/)