16S Metabarcoding and Metagenomics Analysis with Galaxy

Understanding the complex world of microbial communities is essential for modern biological and medical research, but raw sequencing data can feel overwhelming. This text-based course teaches you how to process and interpret 16S rRNA data using Galaxy, a powerful web-based platform that requires zero programming. By the end of this course, you will transition from a beginner to a confident analyst capable of running standard metagenomics pipelines. You will read through clear explanations, understand the underlying biological concepts, and learn how to interpret taxonomic profiles. What you'll learn: Understand the foundational concepts of 16S rRNA sequencing, metabarcoding, and metagenomics; Navigate the Galaxy platform interface to upload data, run tools, and manage history; Perform quality control and preprocessing on raw sequencing reads to ensure reliable results; Classify taxonomic groups and compare Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) with modern Amplicon Sequence Variants (ASVs); Interpret ecological diversity metrics and taxonomic abundance plots to draw biological conclusions. The course begins with core terminology and the theory behind marker gene sequencing before guiding you step-by-step through a complete data analysis pipeline. You will learn to configure tools, chain tasks together, and troubleshoot common data quality issues. This course is designed for beginners, students, and life science researchers who want to analyze microbiome data without writing command-line code. No prior programming or bioinformatics experience is required. Start your journey into microbial data analysis and unlock the secrets of the microbiome today.