The workshop will take place from February 7 - February 14, 2025
This year’s workshop aims to bring ~50 researchers together to discuss challenges associated with the profiling and analyses of metagenomic microbial communities (bacterial, fungal and viral). Technologies to profile these extremely complex communities of ‘’small organisms’’ have developed very quickly and it is now routine and cost effective to sample the microbiome across a broad range of domains. The invitees this year cover domains such as the microbiome of the human gut/oral/respiratory/urogenital in the context of health and disease; clinical metagenomics; of animals in relation to food production systems; the microbiome and diet; fungal viruses; approaches for identifying new microbes. The meeting will also discuss high-throughput systems level approaches for studying microbes including genetic screens, single-cell bacterial/fungal profiling, microfluidic sample handling, improved CRISPR/CasX modification toolkits, synthetic biology along with core biostatistical computational approaches including generative modeling in microscopy, sample decomposition and compositional data (CODA) analyses.