Overview

This is an entry level course aimed that those with a reasonable biological background but no significant experience with bioinformatics. The course is broadly based around a series of exercises in which a combination of simple analytical tools and reference to publicly available databases is applied to the investigation of a single human gene. The training manual for the course is comprised of detailed instructions for the tasks undertaken. Included are, questions (with answers) and discussion of and the interpretation of the results achieved.

Participants are asked to imagine an interest in the disease aniridia. Course exercises then provide extremely detailed instruction leading participants to discover the gene primarily associated with this disease and all that is interesting about that gene and its protein products.

This course will also provide a soft introduction to Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) data analysis. This part of the course aims at providing basic skills that are needed when one needs to process NGS data, such as evaluating data quality, trimming sequences, changing data formats, visualising data, etc. Then, participants will learn how to address a simple transcriptomics problem, stepwise, using open source bioinformatics tools.

Objectives

The operation of the various programs used in the exercises will be explained, but only to the extent that allows a user to select parameters intelligently and to interpret results.

The course will provide participants with an awareness of a wide range of bioinformatics tools and sufficient experience to use those tools in basic investigations with a relatively high degree of user independence.

In the training course design, this is intentionally built-in, to allow us to show a wide range of analytical techniques while providing enough experience to break the ice in all of them.

Target Audience

This course is intended for those wishing to investigate how they might begin to exploit the ever expanding abundance of computing and data resources for researchers seeking help in using them.

Course Pre-requisites

Basic understanding of molecular biology. No particular computing expertise will be assumed.