MINOTA: Maine INBRE Non-model Organism Transcriptome Analysis Workshop 2020

MDI Biological Laboratory and the Maine INBRE program will once again hold the workshop entitled: “MINOTA: Maine-INBRE Nonmodel Organism Transcriptome Analysis”.

In light of the ongoing Covid-19 issues, this year’s workshop will take place as a virtual event spread over four days (November 9-12, 2020), with prerecorded lectures, live video conferenced discussion sections, and a shared remote cloud computing workspace that will allow for shared analysis of large-scale transcriptome data sets.

The combination of increased availability and reduced expense in obtaining high-throughput sequencing has made transcriptome profiling analysis a standard tool for the molecular characterization of widely disparate biological systems.  Researchers working in common model organisms (e.g., mouse, zebrafish, or nematode) have relatively easy access to a broad range of resources and tools for the analysis and interpretation of their data.  In contrast, researchers working in less commonly studied organisms and systems often must develop project/system/organism-specific resources and tools.  These tasks can be especially challenging to research groups that work in isolation at institutions with relatively modest computational staffing and resources.

Image credit: Markus Frederich

In response to this challenge, MDI Biological Laboratory and the Maine INBRE are again hosting the MINOTA workshop with the specific goal of bringing together a community of Maine INBRE researchers and students who are focused on transcriptome analysis of nonmodel organisms.  The goals for this workshop are

• Presentations and discussion of state of the art computational approaches and tools for:
  • Assembly of RNAseq reads into de novo transcriptomes
  • Functional annotation of de novo transcriptomes
  • Gene expression analysis using the transcriptome as a target for alignment/quantification
  • Carrying out computational analysis in robust and reproducible manners
• Establishment of shared needs, communication forums, and possibly working groups
• Sharing of resources to facilitate nonmodel transcriptome analysis in a cloud computing context (established and maintained by Maine INBRE and MDIBL personnel)

This project is supported by the Maine INBRE and MDI Biological Laboratory.