Impression of Training School Porto, Portugal

From September 12 to 14, 22 trainees from 14 countries learned about the rumen microbial ecosystem in Porto, Portugal. Three teachers were invited: Sinead Leahy (Ag Research, New Zealand), Henrik Bjorn Nielsen and Damian Plitcha (both from Center for Biological Sequence Analysis, DTU Systems Biology, Technical University of Denmark).

The Training School started with a general Rumen Microbiology session by Sinead. She covered a general overview of rumen microbiology, and explained who’s there? (e.g., types and abundance of the different microbes) After that she went in a bit more in depth on what they are doing? (e.g., what microbes are performing what functions) and finally the microbial contribution to an animal phenotype, related to low methane emitting animals.

The next day, Henrik introduced the trainees to the microbiome bioinformatics, with some practicals given by Damian. This helped the trainees to get some feel to work with microbiome data and they learned tips and tricks to try at home as well.

The final part of the Training School consisted of a description of a big, world-wide project in which several partners collaborated on microbial rumen samples of different species and breeds. This shows the importance of this field related to lowering the methane emission of ruminants.

Presentations of the meeting can be found on this page (password-protected, for the password please contact Yvette.deHaas@wur.nl).