Minor Bioinformatics for Life Science Students

Coordinator: Michiel Noback [NOMI]

More and more, lab technicians encounter data and analysis challenges unsolvable (or unsuitable) for traditional means of storage and exploration (i.e. Excel). Therefore, this minor focuses on those computer skills that will help tackling data handling and analysis challenges in modern life science research. Subjects that will be dealt with are Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies and their applications, and many aspects of data processing: storage strategies, exploration, visualization and analysis. Along the way, basic programming skills in Python and R will be learned.

In the second half of the minor, we will switch to another –but related- domain of bioinformatics. This is the domain of digital experimentation, analysis, inference and visualization. Instead of Python, we will use the (statistical) language R to explore this domain. The central topic will be genome-wide gene expression analysis using RNA-seq data (a NGS technology).