Joey: Using Geneious to teach microbiology
I am Joey McMurdie, a PhD student in Civil and Environmental Engineering here at Stanford University, studying environmental microbiology, environmental molecular biology, and environmental genomics.
I discovered Geneious from Apple's software downloads page. The name and description struck me as being potentially useful, and the more I tried Geneious the more I liked it. I bought a 6-month student license of Geneious Pro, and it ended up being a work horse program for me for some contig assembly and genome sequence gap closure.
The Hopkins Microbiology Course is a revival of a summer course taught at Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station by Cornelius van Niel 40 years ago. That course had a huge impact on the field of microbiology, and was directly and indirectly responsible for many important discoveries. The idea to start a new summer microbiology course at Hopkins Marine Station came from two professors at Stanford with whom I have worked closely in courses and research: my advisor, prof Alfred Spormann, and prof Chris Francis in the department of Geology and Environmental Science. Being a part of the original organization of the course has been very intense, hard work, but also a very gratifying experience. I have no doubt that it will continue to get better each year.
What I like most about Geneious is also how it is most valuable for the students. It is very good at organizing sequence data, switching between formats, and basic sequence analysis. The students organized hundred of sequences from different samples using Geneious, and there aren't many tools out there with the same capabilities that are also multi-platform and affordable. Most of the students had not seen Geneious before the course, and they learned how to use it very quickly. I will recommend that we use it again for the course next year. http://hmc.stanford.edu