Bioconductor’s First Microbiome Course in Brazil: A Successful Workshop at UFMG in Belo Horizonte

Participants of the Bioconductor microbiome workshop in Brazil gathered at UFMG

From April 23rd to 25th, 2025, we hosted the first Bioconductor microbiome course in Brazil, a three-afternoon workshop held at the Interunits Post-Graduate Program of Bioinformatics at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) (link) in Belo Horizonte. The workshop brought together 24 enthusiastic participants, ranging from undergraduate students to full professors, all eager to deepen their knowledge of microbiome data analysis using R and Bioconductor.

We were honored to welcome Professor Leo Lahti, a Bioconductor developer from the University of Turku, Finland, who led the course. He was joined by local alumni João Pedro P. de Almeida and myself, Izabela Mamede, as co-instructors, delivering hands-on training and insights throughout the workshop.

The course covered the fundamentals of microbiome data analysis, with practical sessions focused on utilizing the Bioconductor framework documented in the online book Orchestrating Microbiome Analysis with Bioconductor for data manipulation, visualization, and statistical modeling. Participants learned how to manipulate, visualize, and statistically model microbiome data using R-based tools, gaining the skills to integrate Bioconductor workflows into their own research. Bioconductor is a global open-source community with a particular focus on statistical programming and multi-omic data integration in life sciences.

Several participants traveled from other Brazilian states to join the workshop, underscoring the growing national interest in microbiome data analysis and Bioconductor tools.

🔍 Workshop Highlights

Students especially enjoyed sessions on:

Taxonomic assignment
Community similarity
Data visualization

The course followed best practices in data science education, inspired by the Carpentries model, and was led by two Bioconductor Carpentries instructors. Both Professor Leo Lahti and Izabela Mamede were among the 31 instructors trained over the past two years as part of this initiative. Read more in the Bioconductor Carpentries update.

A big thank you to everyone who made this event possible, especially the Bioinformatics program heads, Professors Flávia Aburjaile and Raquel Minardi, Professor Glória R. Franco who helped set up and organize the workshop, the co-instructors João Paulo P. de Almeida and Izabela Mamede, the participants, and Professor Leo Lahti who traveled all the way from Finland to Brazil to teach the course. The event, as well as the disseminated methodology, was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme FindingPheno (grant 952914).

We hope this workshop serves as a stepping stone for future collaborations and research in microbiome data analysis in Brazil and beyond.

💬 Continue the Conversation on Zulip!

To stay connected and continue the conversation:

Join the #miaverse channel, dedicated to the framework we used in the course (like (Tree)SummarizedExperiment for microbiome). This directly fits the course methodology and is a good place for specific questions and shared learning.
Join the #microbiome_metagenome channel for broader microbiome discussions. This is more useful for general community building and connecting with researchers beyond the course cohort.

👉 You can join the conversation at https://chat.bioconductor.org