To foster international participation, this course will be held online

This course will survey the most advanced methodologies for the study of microbial communities from shotgun metagenomics data. Through a balanced approach of lectures and hands-on lab sections, students will be faced with the most important challenges in the metagenomics scientific practice, which include: tools for data preprocessing, taxonomic profiling, strain-level characterization, microbial genome reconstruction, functional potential characterization, and integrative statistical data analysis. At the end of the course the participants will acquire familiarity with the theory and practice of the most important bioinformatics approaches for metagenomics, including tools for visualisation of results.

This course is intended for researchers and students whose desire is to gather the necessary knowledge to analyse high-throughput microbiome data from different sources. The course will overview the basics of the most important metagenomic approaches and will provide the critical knowledge to apply these in future contexts. A particular focus will be given to the long-standing challenges that have allowed the design of the described tools, to provide a general perspective about the application of these methodologies in the future.