The University of Massachusetts-Amherst is awarded a grant to develop an open-source computational workbench, the Horton project. This workbench will allow microbial ecologists to statistically describe and compare microbial communities using DNA sequence information within the R programming environment. Advancing the field of bioinformatics within microbial ecology is essential as the field grapples with concepts such as community structure-function relationships, biogeography, effects of perturbation, and understanding the ecology of polymicrobial infections. These concepts are particularly challenging in microbial ecology because of the staggering complexity that characterizes most microbial communities. The first generation of tools that were developed have significantly advanced the field of microbial ecology. Continued development of these tools and the creation of new tools are essential as investigators pose new research questions and use alternative sources of data including metagenomics and pyrosequencing. It is also possible that many of these tools will be useful to classical community ecologists employing molecular tools. This project will pursue three specific aims: (i) initiate the user-supported Horton Project to develop and disseminate a collection of recipes for describing and comparing microbial communities; (ii) improve the versatility and performance of pre-existing methods and develop new methods for describing and comparing collections of PCR-generated sequence collections; (iii) expand and validate additional tools for use with pyrosequencing and metagenomic sequence collections. The proposed research will facilitate other investigators in their attempts to create new knowledge and improve effective information management within the field of microbial ecology and perhaps beyond. In addition to the scientific impacts of the project, the broader impacts will include facilitating an 8-week long mentor-training workshop for graduate students, postdocs, and faculty. Finally, workshops will be offered each summer to train microbial ecologists to use phylogenetic and statistical software.
