NGS Bioinformatics Course

During the past seven days (1^st – 7^th October) I attended the jam-packed Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) Bioinformatics course hosted at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus.  I learned so much about NGS that I find it difficult to summarize it all in this blog.  

However, as an all-encompassing overview I can say we started from the very beginning of NGS technologies (ie the history of NGS tech.) and the theory behind each technology advancement -> sequence data formats and tools -> sequence alignment and their QC -> structural variation -> RNA-seq -> ChiP-seq analysis -> NGS visualization and available repositories.

Sequencing chips (top left & middle left); WG campus (top middle);  touring the Sanger Institute facilities (top and bottom right);  LMV presenting the group project (bottom left); book containing the DNA sequence chromosome 22 (bottom middle)

A really great way to apply our knowledge gained was to complete a group project based on a current study.  We, the Mos(key)to Hunters [our group’s name] were tasked to find the resistance mechanism to a Malaria drug by characterizing the genes responsible using sequenced data (one parent and three drug-resistant clones).  Our findings revealed a novel SNP associated with the ATP6 gene and our outlook recommendation was to confirm our in-silico results with wet lab experiments such as CRISPR-CAS.

Screenshots from our in-silico results highlighting the new SNP

Overall I would highly recommend this course albeit intensive!  However, I would have to add an important note:  to take full advantage of this course, a basic knowledge of Unix/command line use is imperative as all practicals are taught using Linux.

LMV