Breaking Barriers with Bread

Widespread usage of high throughput sequencing (HTS) in Life Sciences has produced a demand for undergraduate and graduate institutions to offer class exposing students to all aspects of HTS (sample acquisition, laboratory work, sequencing technologies, bioinformatics, and statistical analyses). Despite the increase in demand, many challenges exist for these types of classes. We advocate for the usage of the Sourdough starter microbiome for implementing meta amplicon sequencing. The relatively small community, dominated by a few taxa, enables potential contaminants to be easily identified, while between sample differences can be quickly assessed statistically. Finally, bioinformatic pipelines and statistical analyses can be carried out on students laptops or in a teaching computer lab. In two semesters adopting this system, 12 of 14 students were able to effectively capture the Sourdough starter microbiome, using the instructors paired sample as reference.

高通量测序（High Throughput Sequencing，HTS）在生命科学领域的广泛应用，催生了本科与研究生院校开设相关课程的需求，以使学生全面掌握高通量测序的全流程环节，涵盖样本获取、实验室操作、测序技术、生物信息学（bioinformatics）与统计分析。尽管此类需求持续增长，但相关课程的开设仍面临诸多挑战。我们倡议采用酸面团发酵剂微生物组（Sourdough starter microbiome）开展宏扩增子测序（meta amplicon sequencing）教学实践。该微生物组群落规模相对较小，且以少数分类群为主导，可快速识别潜在污染样本；同时，样本间的差异可通过统计方法快速评估。最后，学生可在个人笔记本电脑或教学机房中完成生物信息学分析流程与统计检验工作。在采用该教学体系的两个学期中，以教师提供的配对样本作为参照，14名学生中有12名能够有效表征酸面团发酵剂的微生物组特征。