Next Friday, during the VIZBI 2018 session on Populations, Patrick Chain from Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA) will speak about Next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology and the genomic exploration of the minor players in a microbial community. This extra throughput and “big data”, coupled with lack of tools for processing and visualization, presents a new set of challenges in interpreting these complex data sets. He will speak about current issues in this area, including a series of efforts designed to lower the barrier for non-experts to use NGS for routine applications. Further information about Patrick’s talk is available at https://vizbi.org/Talks/Patrick_Chain.