All Bioinformatics courses

This week-long course is aimed at people with little or no experience using statistical analyses in research. It introduces participants to core concepts in statistics and experimental design, aimed at ensuring that the resulting data is able to address the research question using appropriate statistical methods.

The interactive course gives participants a hands-on, applied foundation in statistical data analysis and experimental design. Group exercises and discussions are combined with short lectures that introduce key theoretical concepts. Computational methods are used throughout the course, using the R programming language. Formative assessment exercises allow participants to test their understanding throughout the course and encourage questions and critical thinking.

By the end of the course participants will be able to critically evaluate and design effective research questions, linking experimental design concepts to subsequent statistical analyses. It will allow participants to make informed decisions on which statistical tests are most appropriate to their research questions. The course will provide a solid grounding for further development of applied statistical competencies.

If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here.

Chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing (ChIP-seq) is a method used to identify binding sites for transcription factors, histone modifications and other DNA-binding proteins across the genome. In this course, we will cover the fundamentals of ChIP-seq data analysis, from raw data to downstream applications.

We will start with an introduction to ChIP-seq methods, including important considerations when designing your experiments. We will cover the bioinformatic steps in a standard ChIP-seq analysis workflow, covering raw data quality control, trimming/filtering, mapping, duplicate removal, post-mapping quality control, peak calling and peak annotation. We will discuss metrics used for quality assessment of the called peaks when multiple replicates are available, as well as the analysis of differential binding across sample groups. Throughout the course we will also cover tools and packages that can be used for visualising and exploring your results.

If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here.

• Our courses are only free for registered University of Cambridge students. All other participants will be charged according to our charging policy.
• Attendance will be taken on all courses and a charge is applied for non-attendance, including for University of Cambridge students. After you have booked a place, if you are unable to attend any of the live sessions, please email the Bioinfo Team.
• Further details regarding eligibility criteria are available here.

Chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing (ChIP-seq) is a method used to identify binding sites for transcription factors, histone modifications and other DNA-binding proteins across the genome. In this course, we will cover the fundamentals of ChIP-seq data analysis, from raw data to downstream applications.

We will start with an introduction to ChIP-seq methods and cover the bioinformatic steps in processing ChIP-seq data. We will then introduce the use of the graphical program SeqMonk to explore and visualise your data. Finally, you will perform peak calling and perform differential enrichment analysis.

If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here.

• ♿ The training room is located on the first floor and there is currently no wheelchair or level access.
• Our courses are only free for registered University of Cambridge students. All other participants will be charged according to our charging policy.
• Attendance will be taken on all courses and a charge is applied for non-attendance, including for University of Cambridge students. After you have booked a place, if you are unable to attend any of the live sessions, please email the Bioinfo Team.
• Further details regarding eligibility criteria are available here.
• Guidance on visiting Cambridge and finding accommodation is available here.

This advanced course will cover high-throughput sequencing data processing, ChIP-seq data analysis (including alignment, peak calling), differences in analyses methods for transcription factors (TF) binding and epigenomic datasets, a range of downstream analysis methods for extracting meaningful biology from ChIP-seq data and will provide an introduction to the analysis of open chromatin with ATAC-seq and long-distance interactions with chromosomal conformation capture based Hi-C datasets.

Materials for this course can be found here.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to book or register your interest by linking here.

This course focuses on methods for the analysis of small non-coding RNA data obtained from high-throughput sequencing (HTS) applications (small RNA-seq). During the course, approaches to the investigation of all classes of small non-coding RNAs will be presented, in all organisms.

Day 1 will focus on the analysis of microRNAs and day 2 will cover the analysis of other types of small RNAs, including Piwi-interacting (piRNA), small interfering (siRNA), small nucleolar (snoRNA) and tRNA-derived (tsRNA).

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to book by linking here.

Analysis of whole genome data unearths a multitude of variants of different classes, which need to be filtered, annotated and validated to arrive at a causative variant for a disease. The current short length sequences, whilst being excellent at identifying single nucleotide variants and short insertions/deletions, struggle to correctly map structural variants (SVs). Long-read sequencing technologies offer improvements in the characterisation of genetic variation and regions that are difficult to assess with short-read sequences.

The aim of this course is to familiarise participants with long read sequencing technologies, their applications and the bioinformatics tools used to assemble this kind of data. Lectures will introduce this technology and provide insight into methods for the analysis of genomic data, while the hands-on sessions will allow participants to run analysis pipelines, focusing on data generated by the Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) platform.

The training room is located on the first floor and there is currently no wheelchair or level access available to this level.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to book or register your interest by linking here.

The workshop will cover the basics of de novo genome assembly using a small genome example. This includes project planning steps, selecting fragment sizes, initial assembly of reads into fully covered contigs, and then assembling those contigs into larger scaffolds that may include gaps. The end result will be a set of contigs and scaffolds with sufficient average length to perform further analysis on, including genome annotation (link to that nomination). This workshop will use tools and methods targeted at small genomes. The basics of assembly and scaffolding presented here will be useful for building larger genomes, but the specific tools and much of the project planning will be different.

This workshop will also introduce genome annotation in the context of small genomes. We’ll begin with genome annotation concepts, and then introduce resources and tools for automatically annotating small genomes. The workshop will finish with a review of options for further automatic and manual tuning of the annotation, and for maintaining it as new assemblies or information becomes available.

This session will include an introduction to the Galaxy platform.

This event is co-organized with EMBL-ABR and the Genomics Virtual Lab. Course materials can be found here.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to book by linking here.

Recent advances in genomics, proteomics, imaging and other technologies, have resulted in data being generated at a faster rate than they can be meaningfully analysed. In this course we will show you how cloud computing can be used to meet the challenges of storage, management and analysis of big data. The first half of the course will introduce cloud infrastructure technologies. The second half will cover tools for collaborative working, resource management, and creation of workflows. The instructors will demonstrate how they are using cloud computing in their own research.

N.B. If you sign up for this course, you will be automatically registered for an AWS educate account, which will provide you with sufficient AWS credits to complete the course exercises. If you decide to continue using cloud computing after the course, you will need to either purchase more credits or apply for a grant from programs like: AWS Cloud Credits for Research, Microsoft Azure for Research or Google Cloud Platform Education Grants.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to book by linking here.

In this course we will introduce web-based, open source tools to analyse and interpret high-throughput biological data.

The main focus will be g:Profiler - a toolset for finding most significant functional groups for a given gene or protein list; MEM - a query engine allowing to mine hundreds of public gene expression datasets to find most co-expressed genes based on a query gene; and ClustVis - a web tool for visualizing clustering of multivariate data using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) plot and heatmap.

MEM and g:Profiler are ELIXIR-Estonia node services.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to book by linking here.

The aim of this workshop is to provide principal investigators with an introduction to the challenges of working with biological data and to the best practices, and tools, needed to perform bioinformatics research effectively and reproducibly.

On day 1, we will cover the importance of experimental design, discuss the challenges associated with (i) the analysis of high-throughput sequencing data (utilising RNA-seq as a working example) and (ii) the application of machine learning algorithms, as well as issues relating to reusability and reproducibility.

On day 2, we will put into practice concepts from day 1, running a RNA-seq data analysis pipeline, going from raw reads through differential expression analysis and the interpretation of downstream analysis results. Challenges encountered at each step of the analytical pipeline will be discussed. Please note that day 2 is optional.

The training room is located on the first floor and there is currently no wheelchair or level access available to this level.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to book or register your interest by linking here.

PLEASE NOTE The Bioinformatics Team are presently teaching as many courses live online. We aim to simulate the classroom experience as closely as possible, with opportunities for one-to-one discussion with tutors and a focus on interactivity throughout.

InterMine is a freely available open-source data warehouse built specifically for the integration and analysis of complex biological data sets.

InterMine-based data analysis platforms are available for many organisms including mouse, rat, budding yeast, plants (over 87 plant genomes), nematodes, fly, zebrafish, Hymenoptera, Planaria, and more recently human.

Genomic and proteomic data within InterMine databases includes pathways, gene expression, interactions, sequence variants, GWAS, regulatory data and protein expression. InterMine provides sophisticated query and visualisation tools both through a web interface and a powerful web service API, with multiple language bindings including Python and R.

This course will focus on programmatic access to InterMine through the API and InterMine searches will be done using Python and R scripts. The exercises will mainly use the fly, human and mouse databases, but the course is applicable to anyone working with data for which an InterMine database is available (a comprehensive list of InterMine databases is available here.

This event is organised alongside a half day course on Biological data analysis using the InterMine User Interface. More information on this event are available here.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to Book or register Interest by linking here.

PLEASE NOTE The Bioinformatics Team are presently teaching as many courses live online. We aim to simulate the classroom experience as closely as possible, with opportunities for one-to-one discussion with tutors and a focus on interactivity throughout.

InterMine is a freely available open-source data warehouse built specifically for the integration and analysis of complex biological data.

InterMine-based data analysis platforms are available for many organisms including mouse, rat, budding yeast, plants (over 87 plant genomes), nematodes, fly, zebrafishHymenoptera, Planaria, and more recently human.

Genomic and proteomic data within InterMine databases includes pathways, gene expression, interactions, sequence variants, GWAS, regulatory data and protein expression. InterMine provides sophisticated query and visualisation tools both through a web interface and a powerful web service API, with multiple language bindings including Python and R.

This course will focus on the InterMine web interface and will introduce participants to all aspects of the user interface, starting with some simple exercises and building up to more complex analysis encompassing several analysis tools and comparative analysis across organisms. The exercises will mainly use the fly, human and mouse databases, but the course is applicable to anyone working with data for which an InterMine database is available (a comprehensive list of InterMine databases is available here.)

This event is organised alongside a half day course on Biological data analysis using the InterMine API. More information on this event is available here.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to Book or register Interest by linking here.

The Open Microscopy Environment (OME) is an open-source software project that develops tools that enable access, analysis, visualization, sharing and publication of biological image data.

OME has three components:

• OME-TIFF, standardised file format and data model;
• Bio-Formats, a software library for reading proprietary image file formats; and
• OMERO, a software platform for image data management and analysis.

In this one day course, we will present the OMERO platform, and show how Facility Managers can use it to manage users, groups, and their microscopy, HCS and digital pathology data.

Help pages on 'Using OMERO for Facility Managers' can be found here.

This course is organized alongside a one day course on Biological Imaging Data Management for Life Scientists. More information on this event are available here.

This course will be delivered by members of the OMERO team. The OME project is supported by BBSRC and Wellcome Trust.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to book or register your interest by linking here.

The Open Microscopy Environment (OME) is an open-source software project that develops tools that enable access, analysis, visualization, sharing and publication of biological image data.

OME has three components:

• OME-TIFF, standardised file format and data model;
• Bio-Formats, a software library for reading proprietary image file formats; and
• OMERO, a software platform for image data management and analysis.

In this one day course, we will present the OMERO platform, and show how to import, organise, view, search, annotate and publish imaging data. Additionally, we will briefly introduce how to use a variety of processing tools with OMERO.

This course is organized alongside a one day course on Biological Imaging Data Processing for Data Scientists. More information on this event are available here.

This course will be delivered by members of the OMERO team. The OME project is supported by BBSRC and Wellcome Trust.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to book or register your interest by linking here.

The Open Microscopy Environment (OME) is an open-source software project that develops tools that enable access, analysis, visualization, sharing and publication of biological image data.

OME has three components:

• OME-TIFF, standardised file format and data model;
• Bio-Formats, a software library for reading proprietary image file formats; and
• OMERO, a software platform for image data management and analysis.

In this one day course, we will present the OMERO platform, and show how to transition from manual data processing to automated processing workflows. We will introduce how to write applications against the OMERO API, how to integrate a variety of processing tools with OMERO and how to automatically generate output ready for publication.

This course is organized alongside a one day course on Biological Imaging Data Management for Life Scientists. More information on this event are available here.

This course will be delivered by members of the OMERO team. The OME project is supported by BBSRC and Wellcome Trust.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to book or register your interest by linking here.

High-throughput data analyses usually involve many data processing steps, including the use of a range of command line tools and scripts to transform, filter, aggregate and visualise data. Each tool may require a specific set of inputs and options to be defined and, as we chain multiple tools together, this can become challenging to manage. As analyses pipelines become more complex and with the ever-increasing amounts of data being collected in research, reproducible and scalable automatic workflow management becomes increasingly important.

The Snakemake workflow management system is a tool to create reproducible and scalable data analyses pipelines/workflows. Workflows are described via a human-readable, Python-based language. They can be seamlessly scaled to server, cluster, grid and cloud environments, without the need to modify the workflow definition. Finally, Snakemake workflows can entail a description of the required software, which will be automatically deployed to any execution environment.

With over 500k downloads on Bioconda, and over 2k citations, Snakemake is a widely used and accepted standard for reproducible data science that has powered numerous research goals and publications.

This 1-day workshop will cover the principles for building workflows using Snakemake, as well as more advanced strategies to fully customise, automate and scale your analysis.

The training room is located on the first floor and there is currently no wheelchair or level access available to this level.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to Book or register Interest by linking here.

COSMIC, the Catalogue of Somatic Mutations in Cancer, is the world’s largest and most comprehensive expert manually curated resource for exploring the impact of somatic mutations in human cancer. Based at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and available publicly at https://cancer.sanger.ac.uk/cosmic, the latest release includes almost 6 million coding mutations across 1.4 million samples from over 26,000 papers. COSMIC captures the full spectrum of genomic data relating to somatic mutations, so in addition to coding mutations, gene fusions, non-coding mutations, copy-number variants, methylation and drug resistance mutations are included.

This course will use the live COSMIC website and tools to show you how to access and explore this information, seeking to identify genetic causes and targets in all human cancers.

The training room is located on the first floor and there is currently no wheelchair or level access available to this level.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to book or register your interest by linking here.

Fiji/ImageJ is a popular open-source image analysis software application. This course will build on top of the Fiji basic course, to continue explore advanced image processing: segmentation, tracking, and with a specific focus on scripting/programming using Fiji scripting environment. We will use python programming language, and aim to give a tutorial on both image processing and python programming.

This course is run by the CRUK CI Light microscopy core facility.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to Book or register Interest by linking here.

CellProfiler is a free, open-source image analysis software designed to enable biologists without training in computer vision or programming to quantitatively measure phenotypes from thousands of images automatically.

This course will introduce you the basic usage, and several application examples to help you understand and build up image processing and analysis workflows within CellProfiler. It will also cover a brief introduction to the usage of its companion package CellProfiler Analyst, which allows interactive exploration and analysis of image data. Some related theoretical topics in image processing will also be covered.

This course is run by the CRUK CI Light microscopy core facility.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to Book or register Interest by linking here.

Please be aware that this course is currently being re-developed and will not be scheduled to run until redevelopment has been completed. If you are interested in being notified once the course is scheduled, please register your interest.

PLEASE NOTE The Bioinformatics Team are presently teaching as many courses live online, with tutors available to help you work through the course material on a personal copy of the course environment. We aim to simulate the classroom experience as closely as possible, with opportunities for one-to-one discussion with tutors and a focus on interactivity throughout.

This course covers concepts and strategies for working more effectively with Python with the aim of writing reusable code, using function and libraries. Participants will acquire a working knowledge of key concepts which are prerequisites for advanced programming in Python e.g. writing modules and classes.

Note: this course is the continuation of the Introduction to Solving Biological Problems with Python; participants are expected to have attended the introductory Python course and/or have acquired some working knowledge of Python. This course is also open to Python beginners who are already fluent in other programming languages as this will help them to quickly get started in Python.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to book or register your interest by linking here.

Are you aware of the wide range of protein data resources that can easily be accessed and explored to enhance your research? Do you want to know more about the sequence of your protein and its functions? Wondered whether a structure of your protein exists and how to explore it? Want to know more about the potential complexes and reaction pathways your protein of interest is involved in, giving you a better overview of its biological context?

This three day workshop will introduce you to data resources and tools developed by EMBL-EBI that can help you in your protein studies. Each day will focus on a particular protein topic, with the aim of helping you get more from your data and also to explore publically-available data that can further support your research.

The training room is located on the first floor and there is currently no wheelchair or level access available to this level.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to book or register your interest by clicking here.

This interactive workshop offers participants hands-on experience in the use of the Ensembl VEP to annotate genetic variants with the effects they have on Ensembl genes, and the known information about co-located variants. We will also look at known genes and variants, including the types of data available and where they come from.

Also note: This event is part of a series of short introductions focusing on EMBL-EBI resources. If you want to learn more about these separate training events, see the Related Courses section below.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to book by linking here.

Employ InterPro to help you answer your research questions!

This workshop will help you find out why there is a need to automatically annotate proteins, how protein family databases can help meet this challenge, and how InterPro pulls together a number of such databases, allowing you to classify unknown protein sequences and identify their function. The module is a combination of presentations and hands-on practical exercises. You will explore the various features of an InterPro entry, and design a workflow to utilise InterPro in the analysis of real world data.

Also note: This event is part of a series of short introductions focusing on EMBL-EBI resources. If you want to learn more about these separate training events, see the Related Courses section below.

The training room is located on the first floor and there is currently no wheelchair or level access available to this level.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to book or register your interest by linking here.

The European Nucleotide Sequence Archive (ENA) is a global database for storing experimental nucleotide data and also interpreted data (alignment files, variant calling, analysis results). ENA is the database where all raw and consensus viral sequence data should be deposited, including SARS-Cov-2 data. The data is submitted by scientists conducting sequencing experiments and publishing research in the area. Data is fully searchable and available for download. Sequence data includes raw NGS files (FastQ, BAM…), assembled genomes and transcriptomes, and annotated sequences (protein coding genes, non coding RNA, barcode genes, HLA genes).

This training is aimed at a wide range of users that need to retrieve data from ENA, either occasionally or on a regular basis, or those users who will have retrieval needs closer to the course time.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to book by linking here.

This course will give an introduction to the basic concepts of ontologies and how they are useful in biological applications. We will explain what a biomedical ontology is and present the two primary types of ontology: (i) domain ontology and (ii) application ontology, using examples as Gene Ontology (GO) and Experimental Factor Ontology (EFO). The module will also go into details of why big data need ontologies and the ontology capabilities in advanced computational biology.

Also note: This event is part of a series of short introductions focusing on EMBL-EBI resources. If you want to learn more about these separate training events, see the Related Courses section below.

The training room is located on the first floor and there is currently no wheelchair or level access available to this level.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to book or register your interest by linking here.