Bioinformatics for Biologists: Analysing and Interpreting Genomics Datasets (FutureLearn)

With this knowledge, you’ll have the skills to tackle real-world genomics research challenges, enhancing your career prospects in fields such as genomics medicine, bioinformatics, and data science.

This course builds on the foundation of our Bioinformatics for Biologists: An Introduction to Linux, Bash Scripting, and R course to help you enhance your genomic data analysis skills.

Develop your understanding of DNA sequencing

You’ll start by gaining an introduction to sequencing technologies and current sequencing outputs.

Dive into the rich history of DNA sequencing and how it has evolved in the Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) era before gaining practical skills in mapping sequencing data to a reference genome.

Delve into workflow management and analysis

Next, you’ll unpack bioinformatics workflows as you learn how to use workflow management software such as Nextflow.

With this knowledge, you’ll gain skills to adapt existing workflows to your specific needs and optimise your analysis processes.

Explore data analysis with R

Finally, you’ll explore downstream analysis with the versatile R programming language. You’ll learn how to work with pipeline outputs in R to conduct in-depth analysis and visualisation.

Guided by the experts at Wellcome Connecting Science and using hands-on exercises, you’ll finish the course with both the knowledge and practical skills to effectively handle and analyse sequence datasets.

What topics will you cover?

- Brief introduction to sequencing technologies and an overview of current sequencing outputs

- Sequence quality control to ensure data accuracy and reliability

- Bioinformatics workflows utilising tools such as Nextflow using nf-core pipelines

- Mapping sequencing data to a reference genome for alignment and variant calling

- Working with pipeline outputs in R to perform downstream analysis and visualisation.

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to...

- Use software managers to install and run reproducible bioinformatics tools

- Handle and analyse sequence datasets through hands-on exercises

- Analyse quality control metrics for sequencing data

- Modify existing workflows to suit specific task requirements and optimise analysis processes

- Interrogate and interpret the results obtained from running bioinformatics pipelines

- Perform downstream analyses of pipeline outputs using R, enabling data visualisation and further exploration