The MIRADA LTERs project (see working group materials) is an NSF-funded Microbial Biodiversity Survey and Inventory across all 13 of the major aquatic (marine and freshwater) Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites. The long-term objective of our study is to document and describe baseline diversity and relative abundance data for both common and rare members of microbial communities located in aquatic LTER sites and to relate this diversity to the underlying physical and chemical environment. Our project employs a new, high-throughput DNA pyrosequencing technology based on the sequencing of small-subunit ribosomal RNA gene hypervariable regions, that will allow for discovery of novel microbial diversity in the bacterial, archaeal and eukaryal domains of life and enable us to examine whether or not biogeographical patterns exist for microbial populations.
MIRADA LTERs would like to propose a workshop designed to aid LTER investigators and students in manipulation and analysis of 454-pyrosequenced DNA tag data from Bacteria, Archaea and Eukaryotes resulting from this project. Sampling is currently completed for all 13 LTER sites involved in the cross-site study and sequencing is nearly complete for all of the 8 marine sites. We anticipate that sequencing for the remaining 5 freshwater sites will be available before the September ASM workshop. The workshop would cover the following topics and is intended for students and LTER researchers with no former background in microbial ecology:
1) Working with VAMPS tools and downloading filtered data.
2) Creating rarefaction curves and calculating diversity indices.
3) Importing data into PRIMER E and performing basic analyses.
4) Working with incidence data in SPADE.
5) Multivariate analysis options.
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