Taming Big Data
An online community teaching material resource by Professor Tanja Stadler and her group at the ETH Zurich Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering in Basel facilitates the use of a software programme to investigate disease problems. The online resource is called “Taming the BEAST”.
Many organisms that cause infectious diseases mutate so rapidly that their evolutionary and ecological behaviours are inextricably linked. The epidemiology of these pathogens are imprinted on the genetic diversity of their genomes. Consequently, an evolutionary approach based on genetic data fosters the investigation of epidemiological disease problems. Large-scale empirical analyses of the evolutionary dynamics of important pathogens are feasible owing to the increasing availability of pathogen sequence data and the development of new computational and statistical methods of analysis. Such so-called phylogenetic and phylodynamic investigations thus have the objective of describing and quantifying disease spread and examining associations between determinants and disease.
In order to quantify epidemiological processes and use quantifications for future public health measures, complex statistical methods implemented in software are required. BEAST2 is such a software – the programme quantifies past epidemiological processes and thus confidently conduct phylogenetic and phylodynamic analyses.
As the amount of sequencing data increases there is a growing demand for the skills and experience to conduct phylogenetic and phylodynamic analyses. Doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers from Tanja Stadler’s group have thus launched an initiative to fill this gap and provide the resources necessary to learn how to perform analyses with the Bayesian phylogenetic software package BEAST2. BEAST2 is a complex programme and it is challenging to learn how to conduct high-quality analyses without the help of an expert.
In order to facilitate the appropriate use of this BEAST2, Stadler and her group provide an online community teaching material resource - appropriately named "Taming the BEAST". "Taming the BEAST" consists of a comprehensive collection of tutorials written by experts in the field. The website goes hand-in-hand with a series of summer schools, where BEAST2 users get the opportunity to interact with developers during an intensive one week course. Thanks to the modular design of the website, members of the community can curate and contribute tutorials.
"Taming the BEAST" will help the BEAST2 community to grow and make Bayesian phylogenetics more accessible to researchers around the world.
Reference:
external pagehttps://academic.oup.com/sysbio/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/sysbio/syx060