At the start of the year myself, Sidonie Bellot, Oscar Pérez Escobar and Himmah Rustiami received funding from the Darwin Initiative to develop genomics capacity in Indonesia [https://www.darwininitiative.org.uk/project/DARCC018/].

Given the complexity of the subject we planned the first workshop for 5 participants. We carried this out at the start of the month at Badan Riset Inovasi Nasional in Cibinong, Bogor working in conjunction with the Research Center for Biosystematics and Evolution.

With Himmah’s steadfast in-country support and Sidonie and Oscar’s sterling teaching we covered all the course content, bioinformatics practicals and wet labs that included three minION sequencing experiments.

Topics ranged from explaining genome sequencing approaches positives and negatives to phylogenomics and Linux based bioinformatics. The final couple of days involved genome assembly from minION long read data generated earlier in the workshop. This included the full plastid genome of our study taxon – breadfruit or sukun Artocarpus altilis.

Huge thanks go to our participants Marlina, Debi, Lulut, Fitri and Hariri whose enthusiasm, cheeriness and dedication made sure the workshop was only ever going to be a success. We are exceptionally grateful to Dr Bayu Adjie Head of Research Center for Biosystematics and Evolution for his continued encouragement and support. We also thank the Research Center for Plant Conservation, Botanic Gardens and Forestry for a day’s access to the lab at Kebun Raya Bogor.

Cover photo: Sukun tree in East Java overlooked by Gunung Arjuno.