Two ODU marine biologists and Turing users, Kent Carpenter and Dan Barshis, recently received a $4.6-million, five-year Partnership for International Research and Education (PIRE) funding from NSF to conduct a large-scale study in the Philippines on the changes in marine genetic diversity happening over the past century as a result of human fishing activities and other causes such as habitat loss.
This summer (June 19 to July 3), the PIRE team held the 'Omics and Bioinformatics workshop at the Silliman University's Mariano and Lina Lao Activity Center and Technology Laboratory, the Philippines. There were 33 participants from the U.S. and the Philippines. The workshop aims to build the capacity of Philippine researchers to carry out state-of-the-art biology research. "This is the third workshop that we've run in the region and a few [local] labs are full-steam ahead with genomics research projects," said Barshis. The workshop involved lectures and hands-on training on advanced genomics, molecular ecology, and bioinformatics, using real-world data for population genetic studies. Genomic analyses involve massive amounts of data and computation. ODU Research Computing Services proudly supported this workshop by lending access to Turing supercomputer to the workshop participants in the Philippines. The instructor team was very pleased that they were able to use Turing for the lab sessions. In the past, participants had to employ virtual machines on local workstations for the lab, which posed many limitations. According to Barshis, "It would not have been possible to do all our analyses [this year] using a locally-installed virtual machines, so using Turing was vastly preferable from a teaching standpoint."
To learn more about the Philippine PIRE project, readers are invited to visit .