So last Spring quarter Ashley Vater and myself ran a class where we went from abalone feces swabs on the first day, to a draft of a Genome Announcement on the last day… written by the students. With 16 students in the class we ended up with 10 sequenced/assembled/annotated genomes. A full description and summary of the class (with a link to all course materials) can be found here.
So that Genome Announcement has finally come out “Draft Genome Sequences of Shewanella sp. Strain UCD-FRSP16_17 and Nine Vibrio Strains Isolated from Abalone Feces”, with all the students listed as authors. It was a great experience for all concerned, now we need to figure out a way to scale it up and reduce the cost.
Stay tuned because this quarter we’re trying a version that focuses more on basic microbiology (antibiotic resistance) and less on bioinformatics (no genome sequencing).