On  Tuesday November 24th 2015 we hosted a series of workshops by Bioinformatics company NSilico.

Bioinformatics has become a hugely important element of many areas of modern biological research, including genetics, molecular biology, proteomics, molecular medicine and many more.

NSilico is the provider of the worlds most easy to use data management and analytics software for the life sciences. The series will be given by Dr Michael Bekaert, a senior Bioinformatician at Nsilico. He is a leading computational biologist with previous involvement in research and teaching projects in numerous sectors including bacterial genomics and cow milk metabolism optimisation.

The following lectures and workshops were open to all students:

“Sequencing and Genomic timeline”

Abstract: “From the origin of genomics to the recent progresses in sequencing technology. An introduction to Genomics and an application to discover genes associated with sex determination”

Topic: Sequencing technologies, Structural Genomics, Functions Genomics, Genetic maps and sex determination.

“60-minute genomes*” 

Abstract: “The current high-throughput sequencing technologies are enabling the ability the sequence a full genome for the same price as a few dozen of genes. However, making sense of this deluge of data is a new challenge that requires expertise and time. Nonetheless, this ability allows the building of genetic maps (for complex organisms) or to assemble full genomes (for bacteria or viruses) in less than an hour, with great accuracy, using cloud computing.”

Topic: RAD-sequencing (genetic map), whole genome assembly (bacteria) and cloud-computing.

This series provided a great opportunity to any biologists wishing to extend their knowledge and improve their expertise in bioinformatics.