This course will introduce methodologies used to characterize and understand lung and airway microbiota using culture-independent methods. During the proposed sessions, participants will learn how to design, execute, analyze and interpret a lung microbiome study. Hands on experiences will include the use of Quantitative Insights Into Microbial Ecology (QIIME), a bioinformatic pipeline used to process raw sequencing data and R (Phyloseq and Vegan), statistical software packages used to analyze and graphically display microbiome data. 16S rRNA gene sequencing data will be provided to attendees to perform analyses.