Our third end-of-year symposium was an official satellite event of the Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society ABACBS Conference 2025.

Plenary speakers

• Dr Natalie Stevens: "Innate Allies: The Microbiome’s Role in Shaping Immunity"

• Dr Paul Joyce: "Exploring the Bidirectional Relationship between Gut Bugs & Drugs"

This event was sponsored by ABACBS, BiomeBank, AGRF, and UniSA Clinical & Health Sciences.

See the full program here.

The workshop delivered basic training in Nextflow (https://www.nextflow.io), a workflow management system that enables the development of robust, reproducible, and scalable workflows for scientific and data analysis. Additionally, participants were introduced to the nf-core initiative (https://nf-co.re), a framework for collaborative work toward reproducible and reusable bioinformatics pipelines (Ewels et al. Nat Biotech 2020). 

Instructors:

• Dr Chris Hakkaard (Developer Advocate at Seqera labs)

• Dr Patricia Agudelo-Romero (Computational Biologist at Telethon Kids Institute.

• Dr Jose A Caparros-Martin (Telethon Kids Institute)

AHMRN's very first in-person event was an official satellite of the Australasian Neuroscience Society's 2022 meeting. It brought together human microbiome researchers to share, learn, and connect in a hybrid event held online and at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne.

Plenary speakers: 

• A/ Prof Elisa Hill: "Autism and connections between the gut and CNS"

• Prof Margaret Morris: "The modern diet: cross-talk between brain changes, cognition, and gut microbiome in the rat"

• Prof Elaine Holmes: "Metabolic profiling in precision medicine"

A virtual catch-up for those looking to meet like-minded researchers with an interest in FMT. Dr Nadia Lopes Amorim shared her expertise in designing FMT pre-clinical studies.

Run over four weeks, this group course provided structure and guidance as attendees worked through an online microbial analysis course together.

We kicked off 2022 by diving straight into the deep end, with an event focused on new ideas in microbiome research.

Speakers

• Dr Mireia Valles-Colomer: "Transmission of the microbiota across multiple generations"

• Dr Archita Mishra: "Microbiota-mediated foetal priming of the immune system"

A virtual catch-up for those looking to meet like-minded researchers with an interest in FMT.

Dr Hannah Wardill presented the new and exciting GRAFT guidelines of which she is senior author. Hannah's presentation sparked some discussion points and attendees had the chance to ask questions and discuss points of interest.

An online lightning talk event where our members shared their microbiome super powers for the greater good.

• Svetlina Vasileva, Queensland Brain Institute

• Dr Carolina Gubert, The Florey Institute of Neuroscience & Mental Health

• Samantha Dawson, Food & Mood Centre, Deakin University

• Ghayah Al-Qadami, School of Biomedicine, University of Adelaide

• Prof Mark Nicol, University of Western Australia

• Dr Guillaume Meric, Systems Genomics Lab, Baker Heart & Diabetes Institute

• Prof Nicolas Rasmussen, University of New South Wales

The Australasian Human Microbiome Research Network’s inaugural event.

• Georgina Hold: “Who’s who of the human microbiome: an introduction to key microbes”

• A/Prof Andy Holmes: “What is lost and gained with 16S sequencing relative to shotgun? Is shotgun always better?”

• Dr Thom Quinn: “Appropriate statistics and data transformation for compositional data”