Workshop "The local Pangenome" in Alicante, Spain

Bia Walter Costa and Rose Brouns attended the workshop "The Local Pangenome" in Alicante, Spain, from 25 to 28 October 2023. The workshop was composed of full and flash oral talks by researchers all over the world who are interested in the pangenome. The pangenome can be understood as the full collection of genes of a species or another pre-defined taxa or group. The core pangenome is shared by all isolates of the group, while the accessory pangenome is present in one or a few isolates. Bia and Rose presented their projects individually as flash oral talks and got useful feedback from other researchers. Insightful full talks were given by Francisco Rodriguez-Valera, Fiona Whelan, Alex Mira, and other amazing researchers. It was interesting to see in several talks that single cell sequencing can be used in the study of pangenomes. SAGs (single cell amplificated genomes) were presented as an alternative to MAGs (metagenome-derived genomes). SAGs seem to offer more accurate genomes when studying communities. We also got to know some interesting tools that could be useful for our work such as Coinfinder (finds gene co-occurance in pangenomes), PPanGGOLiN (creates pangenomes), DiAlign (visualizes of synteny). It was an amazing opportunity for networking and knowing more about high-level research in the pangenome.