EID Workshop on NIAID PATRIC

By Linda Costine

On March 13 and 14, the Emerging and Infectious Disease (EID) Program hosted a workshop educating members on the Pathosystems Resource Integration Center (PATRIC) provided by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).  According to the flyer provided by NIAID, PATRIC is a “Bacterial Bioinformatics Resource Center that provides a unique experience, where researchers can see their private data ‘virtually integrated’ with the public genomic data available for bacteria or archea.  Private data can be run through assembly and annotation pipelines, stored in private workspace and ten compared using the suite of analysis tool”

EID members that registered were provided with a full day’s workshop presented by Rebecca Wattam, Andrew Warren and Maulik Shukla describing the intricacies of this system.  The true worth of this workshop came the second half day, when attendees were able to bring their own data and actually work on PATRIC under the guidance of the three presenters.  This significant HANDS-ON aspect of the meeting was highly valued by participants.