Finals are upon us and that can only mean that I’ve committed myself to reading a stack of manuscripts that students wrote as the final project for the bioinformatics lab I am teaching!  This semester we took raw 16S rRNA sequencing data, analyzed it, interpreted it, and here are the results. Many of my students had never used command line based programs at the beginning of the semester, and now they can discuss the merits of different clustering techniques- I am so proud of them!