Slamovits Lab at Dalhousie University

Tag: bioinformatics

  • Dalhousie University opens Minor in Bioinformatics

    Much of the current research in the biological sciences today requires the handling of “Big Data”. Nowhere is this need more apparent than in the area of genomics, where next generation sequencing techniques are capable of producing, at a relatively low cost, hundreds of gigabytes and even terabytes of DNA sequence data. There is a need for people who have an understanding of molecular and evolutionary genomics (the structure and function of genes and genomes) and the skill set needed to analyze the data. A Minor in Bioinformatics provides students with an introduction to molecular genomics and to some of the informatics tools currently available.

    For details about the program click here

  • International Course in Automated Functional Annotation and Data Mining

    Blast2Go is organizing courses on automated functional annotation – Go here for info and registration

    Cost reduction in sequencing technologies is resulting in a growing number of laboratories getting involved in genome sequencing projects where a large amount of sequencing data is generated. After assembly, a large amount of unique sequences are obtained which need to be further characterized with putative functions. Good and sufficient functional annotations are decisive for follow up analyses such as gene expression, strain variations, tissue functional profiling, etc.

    The course will teach on the principals and practical aspects of automated functional annotation of (novel) sequence data.
    Participants will learn how to :

    • Create and run standard or costumed pipelines for generating functional labels for sequence data.
    • Design annotation strategies and generate different annotation types
    • Create a local database installation for annotation speed up
    • Evaluate and report the results of the functional annotation pipeline
    • Perform data-mining and knowledge discovery using functional annotation and experimental data
    • Study similarities and differences between annotation datasets
    • Generate and modify knowledge-containing functional annotation graphs

    The course will be based on the use of Blast2GO application and will mainly comprise exercises and practical cases. Participants might bring their own data.

    Who should attend? Experimentalists and bioinformaticians working on EST, Next Generation Sequencing andmicroarray design projects, specially (but not exclusively) of non-model species.