Microbial Diversity Web Service "VAMPS" at MBL Receives Sustaining Support

David Mark Welch, director of the MBL's Josephine Bay Paul Center and interim director of the MBL Division of Research, has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to sustain the web service VAMPS (Visualization and Analysis of Microbial Population Structures).

Astrolithium. Credit: David Patterson — Photo: *Astrolithium.* Credit: David Patterson

VAMPS is a free, open-source, database-driven website that allows researchers using data from massively-parallel sequencing (MPS, or “next-generation sequencing”) projects to analyze the diversity of microbial communities and the relationships between communities; to explore these analyses in an intuitive visual context; and to download analyses and images for publication. Based at the MBL, VAMPS currently hosts more than 200 projects encompassing more than 5,000 datasets and over 250 million sequence tags, and is used by nearly 900 investigators from around the world.