Bioinformatics course timetable
October 2023
| Wed 25 |
Have you heard about High Performance Computing, but are not sure what it is or whether it is relevant for your work? Would you like to use a HPC, but are not sure where to start? Are you using your personal computer to run computationally demanding tasks, which take long and slow down your work? Do you need to use software that runs on Linux, but don't have access to a Linux computer? If any of these questions apply to you, then this course might be for you! Knowing how to work on a High Performance Computing system is an essential skill for applications such as bioinformatics, big-data analysis, image processing, machine learning, parallelising tasks, and other high-throughput applications. In this course we will cover the basics of High Performance Computing, what it is and how you can use it in practice. This is a hands-on workshop, which should be accessible to researchers from a range of backgrounds and offering several opportunities to practice the skills we learn along the way. As an optional session for those interested, we will also introduce the (free) HPC facilities available at Cambridge University (the course is not otherwise Cambridge-specific).
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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| Thu 26 |
Have you heard about High Performance Computing, but are not sure what it is or whether it is relevant for your work? Would you like to use a HPC, but are not sure where to start? Are you using your personal computer to run computationally demanding tasks, which take long and slow down your work? Do you need to use software that runs on Linux, but don't have access to a Linux computer? If any of these questions apply to you, then this course might be for you! Knowing how to work on a High Performance Computing system is an essential skill for applications such as bioinformatics, big-data analysis, image processing, machine learning, parallelising tasks, and other high-throughput applications. In this course we will cover the basics of High Performance Computing, what it is and how you can use it in practice. This is a hands-on workshop, which should be accessible to researchers from a range of backgrounds and offering several opportunities to practice the skills we learn along the way. As an optional session for those interested, we will also introduce the (free) HPC facilities available at Cambridge University (the course is not otherwise Cambridge-specific).
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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| Fri 27 |
Have you heard about High Performance Computing, but are not sure what it is or whether it is relevant for your work? Would you like to use a HPC, but are not sure where to start? Are you using your personal computer to run computationally demanding tasks, which take long and slow down your work? Do you need to use software that runs on Linux, but don't have access to a Linux computer? If any of these questions apply to you, then this course might be for you! Knowing how to work on a High Performance Computing system is an essential skill for applications such as bioinformatics, big-data analysis, image processing, machine learning, parallelising tasks, and other high-throughput applications. In this course we will cover the basics of High Performance Computing, what it is and how you can use it in practice. This is a hands-on workshop, which should be accessible to researchers from a range of backgrounds and offering several opportunities to practice the skills we learn along the way. As an optional session for those interested, we will also introduce the (free) HPC facilities available at Cambridge University (the course is not otherwise Cambridge-specific).
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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This award winning course is intended to provide a strong foundation in practical statistics and data analysis using the R software environment. The underlying philosophy of the course is to treat statistics as a practical skill rather than as a theoretical subject and as such the course focuses on methods for addressing real-life issues in the biological sciences. There are three core goals for this course:
R is an open source programming language so all of the software we will use in the course is free. In this course, we explore classical statistical analysis techniques starting with simple hypothesis testing and building up to linear models and power analyses. The focus of the course is on practical implementation of these techniques and developing robust statistical analysis skills rather than on the underlying statistical theory. After the course you should feel confident to be able to select and implement common statistical techniques using R and moreover know when, and when not, to apply these techniques.
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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November 2023
| Fri 3 |
This award winning course is intended to provide a strong foundation in practical statistics and data analysis using the R software environment. The underlying philosophy of the course is to treat statistics as a practical skill rather than as a theoretical subject and as such the course focuses on methods for addressing real-life issues in the biological sciences. There are three core goals for this course:
R is an open source programming language so all of the software we will use in the course is free. In this course, we explore classical statistical analysis techniques starting with simple hypothesis testing and building up to linear models and power analyses. The focus of the course is on practical implementation of these techniques and developing robust statistical analysis skills rather than on the underlying statistical theory. After the course you should feel confident to be able to select and implement common statistical techniques using R and moreover know when, and when not, to apply these techniques.
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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| Mon 6 |
This workshop will focus on the theory and applications of metagenomics for the analysis of complex microbiomes (microbial communities). We will cover a range of methods from the fastest, simplest and cheapest amplicon-based methods up to Hi-C metagenomics techniques that give highly detailed results on complex microbial communities. In addition to the theory, we will introduce several bioinformatic software packages suited for the analysis of metagenomic data, quality control and downstream analysis and interpretation of the results.
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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| Fri 10 |
This award winning course is intended to provide a strong foundation in practical statistics and data analysis using the R software environment. The underlying philosophy of the course is to treat statistics as a practical skill rather than as a theoretical subject and as such the course focuses on methods for addressing real-life issues in the biological sciences. There are three core goals for this course:
R is an open source programming language so all of the software we will use in the course is free. In this course, we explore classical statistical analysis techniques starting with simple hypothesis testing and building up to linear models and power analyses. The focus of the course is on practical implementation of these techniques and developing robust statistical analysis skills rather than on the underlying statistical theory. After the course you should feel confident to be able to select and implement common statistical techniques using R and moreover know when, and when not, to apply these techniques.
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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| Mon 13 |
This workshop will focus on the theory and applications of metagenomics for the analysis of complex microbiomes (microbial communities). We will cover a range of methods from the fastest, simplest and cheapest amplicon-based methods up to Hi-C metagenomics techniques that give highly detailed results on complex microbial communities. In addition to the theory, we will introduce several bioinformatic software packages suited for the analysis of metagenomic data, quality control and downstream analysis and interpretation of the results.
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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| Tue 14 |
This workshop will focus on the theory and applications of metagenomics for the analysis of complex microbiomes (microbial communities). We will cover a range of methods from the fastest, simplest and cheapest amplicon-based methods up to Hi-C metagenomics techniques that give highly detailed results on complex microbial communities. In addition to the theory, we will introduce several bioinformatic software packages suited for the analysis of metagenomic data, quality control and downstream analysis and interpretation of the results.
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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| Fri 17 |
The aim of this course is to familiarize the participants with the primary analysis of RNA-seq data. This course starts with a brief introduction to RNA-seq and discusses quality control issues. Next, we will present the alignment step, quantification of expression and differential expression analysis. For downstream analysis we will focus on tools available through the Bioconductor project for manipulating and analysing bulk RNA-seq.
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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| Tue 21 |
The Ensembl Project provides an interface and an infrastructure for accessing genomic information, including genes, variants, comparative genomics and gene regulation data, covering over 300 vertebrate species. This workshop offers a comprehensive practical introduction to the use of the Ensembl genome browser as well as essential background information. This course will focus on the vertebrate genomes in Ensembl, however much of what will be covered is also applicable to the non-vertebrates (plants, bacteria, fungi, metazoa and protists) in Ensembl Genomes.
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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| Wed 22 |
The Ensembl project provides an interface and an infrastructure for accessing genomic information, including genes, variants, comparative genomics and gene regulation data, covering over 300 vertebrate species. This workshop is aimed at researchers and developers interested in exploring Ensembl beyond the website. The workshop covers how to use the Ensembl REST APIs, including understanding the major endpoints and how to write scripts to call them.
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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| Thu 23 |
Many experimental designs end up producing lists of hits, usually based around genes or transcripts. Sometimes these lists are small enough that they can be examined individually, but often it is useful to do a more structured functional analysis to try to automatically determine any interesting biological themes which turn up in the lists. This course looks at the various software packages, databases and statistical methods which may be of use in performing such an analysis. As well as being a practical guide to performing these types of analysis the course will also look at the types of artefacts and bias which can lead to false conclusions about functionality and will look at the appropriate ways to both run the analysis and present the results for publication. Course materials are available here.
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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| Fri 24 |
The aim of this course is to familiarize the participants with the primary analysis of RNA-seq data. This course starts with a brief introduction to RNA-seq and discusses quality control issues. Next, we will present the alignment step, quantification of expression and differential expression analysis. For downstream analysis we will focus on tools available through the Bioconductor project for manipulating and analysing bulk RNA-seq.
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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This course introduces concepts about reproducibility that can be used when you are programming in R. We will explore how to create notebooks - a way to integrate your R analyses into reports using Rmarkdown. The course also introduces the concept of version control. We will learn how to create a repository on GitHub and how to work together on the same project collaboratively without creating conflicting versions of files.
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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December 2023
| Fri 1 |
The aim of this course is to familiarize the participants with the primary analysis of RNA-seq data. This course starts with a brief introduction to RNA-seq and discusses quality control issues. Next, we will present the alignment step, quantification of expression and differential expression analysis. For downstream analysis we will focus on tools available through the Bioconductor project for manipulating and analysing bulk RNA-seq.
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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This course will teach you how to use molecular data to construct and interpret phylogenies. We will start by introducing basic concepts in phylogenetic analysis, what trees represent and how to interpret them. We will then cover how to produce a multiple sequence alignment from DNA and protein sequences, and the pros and cons of different alignment algorithms. You will then learn about different methods of phylogenetic inference, with a particular focus on maximum likelihood and how to assess confidence in your tree using bootstrap resampling. Finally, we will introduce how Bayesian methods can help to estimate the uncertainty in the inferred tree parameters as well as incorporate information for more advanced/bespoke phylogenetic analysis.
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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| Tue 5 |
This workshop focuses on expression proteomics, which aims to characterise the protein diversity and abundance in a particular system. You will learn about the bioinformatic analysis steps involved when working with these kind of data, in particular several dedicated proteomics Bioconductor packages, part of the R programming language. We will use real-world datasets obtained from label free quantitation (LFQ) as well as tandem mass tag (TMT) mass spectrometry. We cover the basic data structures used to store and manipulate protein abundance data, how to do quality control and filtering of the data, as well as several visualisations. Finally, we include statistical analysis of differential abundance across sample groups (e.g. control vs. treated) and further evaluation and biological interpretation of the results via gene ontology analysis. By the end of this workshop you should have the skills to make sense of expression proteomics data, from start to finish.
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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| Wed 6 |
This workshop focuses on expression proteomics, which aims to characterise the protein diversity and abundance in a particular system. You will learn about the bioinformatic analysis steps involved when working with these kind of data, in particular several dedicated proteomics Bioconductor packages, part of the R programming language. We will use real-world datasets obtained from label free quantitation (LFQ) as well as tandem mass tag (TMT) mass spectrometry. We cover the basic data structures used to store and manipulate protein abundance data, how to do quality control and filtering of the data, as well as several visualisations. Finally, we include statistical analysis of differential abundance across sample groups (e.g. control vs. treated) and further evaluation and biological interpretation of the results via gene ontology analysis. By the end of this workshop you should have the skills to make sense of expression proteomics data, from start to finish.
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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| Thu 7 |
The goal of metabolomics is to identify and quantify the complete biochemical composition of a biological sample. With the increase in genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic information there is a growing need to understand the metabolic phenotype that these genes and proteins ultimately control. The aim of this course is to provide an introductory overview of metabolomics and its applications in life sciences and environmental settings. We will introduce different techniques used to extract metabolites and analyse samples to collect metabolomic data (such as HPLC or GC-based MS and NMR), present how to analyse such data, how to identify metabolites using online databases and how to map the metabolomic data to metabolic pathways.
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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This course provides a practical introduction to the writing of Python programs for the complete novice. Participants are lead through the core concepts of Python including Python syntax, data structures and reading/writing files. These are illustrated by a series of example programs. Upon completion of the course, participants will be able to write simple Python programs.
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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| Fri 8 |
The goal of metabolomics is to identify and quantify the complete biochemical composition of a biological sample. With the increase in genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic information there is a growing need to understand the metabolic phenotype that these genes and proteins ultimately control. The aim of this course is to provide an introductory overview of metabolomics and its applications in life sciences and environmental settings. We will introduce different techniques used to extract metabolites and analyse samples to collect metabolomic data (such as HPLC or GC-based MS and NMR), present how to analyse such data, how to identify metabolites using online databases and how to map the metabolomic data to metabolic pathways.
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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This course provides a practical introduction to the writing of Python programs for the complete novice. Participants are lead through the core concepts of Python including Python syntax, data structures and reading/writing files. These are illustrated by a series of example programs. Upon completion of the course, participants will be able to write simple Python programs.
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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| Mon 11 |
This comprehensive course equips you with essential skills and knowledge in bacterial genomics analysis, primarily using Illumina-sequenced samples. You'll gain an understanding of how to select the most appropriate analysis workflow, tailored to the genome diversity of a given bacterial species. Through hands-on training, you'll apply both de novo assembly and reference-based mapping approaches to obtain bacterial genomes for your isolates. You will apply standardised workflows for genome assembly and annotation, including quality assessment criteria to ensure the reliability of your results. Furthermore, you'll learn how to construct phylogenetic trees using whole genome and core genome alignments, enabling you to explore the evolutionary relationships among bacterial isolates. Lastly, you'll apply methods to detect antimicrobial resistance genes. As examples we will use Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pneumoniae, allowing you to become well-equipped to conduct bacterial genomics analyses on a range of species.
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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| Tue 12 |
This comprehensive course equips you with essential skills and knowledge in bacterial genomics analysis, primarily using Illumina-sequenced samples. You'll gain an understanding of how to select the most appropriate analysis workflow, tailored to the genome diversity of a given bacterial species. Through hands-on training, you'll apply both de novo assembly and reference-based mapping approaches to obtain bacterial genomes for your isolates. You will apply standardised workflows for genome assembly and annotation, including quality assessment criteria to ensure the reliability of your results. Furthermore, you'll learn how to construct phylogenetic trees using whole genome and core genome alignments, enabling you to explore the evolutionary relationships among bacterial isolates. Lastly, you'll apply methods to detect antimicrobial resistance genes. As examples we will use Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pneumoniae, allowing you to become well-equipped to conduct bacterial genomics analyses on a range of species.
If you do not have a University of Cambridge Raven account please book or register your interest here. Additional information
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