India|EMBO Symposium – Human microbiome: Resistance and disease

The importance of Human Microbiome research is rapidly gaining momentum for understanding its role in human health and disease. This requires specialized training in efficient statistical and computational algorithms to analyse the big data generated from high-throughput sequencing platforms and provide valid inferences. The field of microbiome research has witnessed an upsurge of various statistical and bioinformatics methods and softwares without adequate manpower trained in proper usage of such tools. Thus, microbiome studies run the danger of identifying spurious associations in patient cohorts with little biological implications for prediction, prognostication and therapy. The present India|EMBO Symposium, organised by Karen Nelson, Indresh Singh, Harinder Singh from JCVI and Souvik Mukherjee and Partha P Majumder from NIBMG, will cover topics related to recent advancements in human microbiome sequencing, antimicrobial resistance, clinical metagenomics, model based analysis of human microbiome, metatranscriptomics and metaproteomics approaches. This India|EMBO Symposium will also include a satellite workshop on metagenomic data analysis and visualization. The present symposium is a timely step in addressing these relevant topics which will help in the development of a multi-dimensional host-microbiome research environment in India.