I started into the analysis of the microbiome data from my colleague, and I think it’s just not going to go anywhere.

On the plus side, I was able to get the fastq files into the virtual machine and create the corresponding QIIME artifacts to get everything processed. This is already a win in terms of my understanding of what I’m looking at and what I’m doing. However, the number of successful sequences ended up being very small. This is probably something on the front end of the project. Maybe there were issues with the sampling, or perhaps something that messed up the processing. But in either case, there’s probably not enough information here to keep moving forward.

I’m going to leave that decision up to my colleague, as she is the one who actually knows what she’s expecting to see. But this is something that I’m glad to have at least started to do. I will probably try to pick up the Atacama tutorial again over the next couple weeks and just finish working my way through it. I’m also going to continue watching the Microbiome Discovery videos because I do want to have that knowledge in the back of my mind.