Microbial Ecology & QIIME2 Core Concepts¶
A conceptual primer that frames the rest of the workshop: what microbiome data is, what 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing actually measures, and how QIIME2 organizes its inputs and outputs around that.
What this lecture covers¶
- Microbial communities and the questions amplicon sequencing can (and can't) answer
- 16S rRNA gene structure, the V4 hypervariable region, and primer choice
- ASVs vs OTUs, and why the workshop uses ASVs
- QIIME2's core data types: artifacts (
.qza), visualizations (.qzv), provenance, and semantic types - The mental model of a QIIME2 pipeline as a graph of typed transformations
Hands-on follow-along¶
This block is lecture-only. The hands-on starts in Sample Preparation & Sequencing Technology.