Jean-Francois Pombert, assistant professor of biology, organized, developed, and taught the Genomic Bootcamp Workshop held at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Porto Alegre, Brazil in August. Two of his Ph.D. students, Robert Butler and Shadi Beidas, assisted him in the organization and implementation of the event.

Twenty seven people from at least four different Brazilian institutions attended the workshop. Topics covered included sequencing technologies, genomic assembly, gene prediction/annotation, contamination removal, functional inferences, manual curation, GenBank deposition, UNIX/Linux BASH, regular expressions, and a quick introduction to Perl programming.

While in Brazil, Pombert also gave a talk at UFRGS titled, “The Ordospora colligata genome; evolution of extreme reduction in microsporidia and host-to-parasite horizontal gene transfer.”