Metagenomics and microbial bioinformatics: latest tools and workflows
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From metagenomics to full-length 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) analysis, Oxford Nanopore sequencing is opening up new opportunities to generate highly complete microbial assemblies, resolve strain-level and within-species diversity, and characterise complex microbial communities at greater resolution than possible with legacy methods.
In this webinar, we'll explore the latest bioinformatics innovations for analysing amplicon and metagenomic nanopore sequencing datasets. Join Jim Shaw and Gaëtan Benoit as they showcase emerging tools and workflows designed to improve the analysis of complex microbial communities.
Jim will present recently developed bioinformatic tools, including Savont and Myloasm, highlighting new approaches for recovering amplicon sequence variant (ASVs) from Oxford Nanopore data, to resolving complete circular genomes and within-species diversity. Gaëtan will then discuss the latest advances in NanoMDBG (versions 1.3 and 1.4), focusing on improved assembly quality, error reduction, and computational performance for recovering high-quality metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) from large, complex datasets.
The webinar will conclude with a live Q&A session, providing an opportunity to engage directly with the speakers and discuss practical research applications, current challenges, and future directions in microbial bioinformatics.
Learning objectives:
Explore recent advances in microbial bioinformatics to enhance your metagenomics research.
Understand how the latest bioinformatics tools can improve microbial genome assembly and analysis.
Learn about new approaches for processing and interpreting nanopore sequencing data.
Evaluate bioinformatics workflows that support microbial discovery and characterisation.
Identify tools and resources that can be applied to your own metagenomics projects.
Meet the speakers
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Anna Maria Niewiadomska, Associate Director, Segment Marketing - Micro & Infectious Disease , Oxford Nanopore TechnologiesWith over 15 years in the field of microbiology, Anna Maria Niewiadomska combines a deep knowledge of experimental and in silico methods for the generation and analysis of genomic and bioinformatic data, with wide-ranging experience in scientific communication and outreach.
Dr Niewiadomska has worked on multiple projects focusing on innate immunology, host/virus interactions, viral phylogenetics, mathematical modeling of antimicrobial resistance, and emerging infectious disease outbreaks. More recently, she has worked on pandemic response to multiple viral outbreaks such as SARS-CoV-2 and Mpox virus and collaborated with the SAVE and SPHERES consortia to identify emerging SARS-CoV-2 viral variants of concern.
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Gaëtan Benoit, Pasteur Institute (Paris, France))
Jim Shaw, Harvard Medical School, Harvard Medical SchoolJim Shaw is a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, advised by Professor Heng Li. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Toronto, supervised by Prof. Yun William Yu. His research interests are in bioinformatics algorithms for microbial genomics. He has developed widely-used metagenomics software, including tools such as skani (Nature Methods, 2023), sylph (Nature Biotechnology, 2024) and myloasm (Nature Biotechnology, 2026).
