The ABRomics team has organized a new training workshop on how to use the platform

The ABRomics platform, dedicated to the collection and analysis of genomic data for research and surveillance on antibiotic resistance, has organized a new training workshop on how to use the platform.

Following up on the first workshop held in October 2024, two months before the ABRomics platform was first launched, the development team presented all the features included in the genomic version of ABRomics during a new workshop. The training session took place on May 6 and 7 at the Institut Pasteur in Paris and brought together a dozen participants from a wide variety of backgrounds (microbiologists, clinicians, bioinformaticians, etc.); the vast majority of them were experiencing the ABRomics platform for the first time.

The first half-day was focused on getting started with the platform: an overview of its features, exploring the interface, and running analyses using test datasets. Participants also learned about the key steps in the ABRomics workflow and the different sections of the analysis report, as well as how to submit data and manage projects.

The second half-day allowed participants to work on their own datasets: they ran analyses on anywhere from about ten (at the end of the first half-day) to several hundred (in this case, using a workflow created prior to the training) strains of a wide variety of bacterial species, reviewed and summarized the analysis reports, and then presented and discussed the results. Finally, the workshop concluded with discussions on users’ priority needs, the platform’s interface and usability, as well as future developments for ABRomics.

This latest training session received very positive feedback from participants, particularly regarding improvements to existing features and the addition of tools that would allow us to go beyond the generic nature of current analyses, thereby meeting the needs of microbiologists who specialize in bacterial species with significant specific characteristics. It is worth noting here that participants were unanimous in their praise of the ABRomics platform’s simplicity, user-friendliness, and potential!

The team will now prepare a detailed summary of the discussions that took place, as well as a list of priority areas for development that will further improve the genomic version of the ABRomics platform, which is currently under development.