Introduction to Bioinformatics at CBRG

This day-long course will be held on Friday, 12th December 2008

This course is intended for new users and/or anyone not familiar with using their molbiol account for bioinformatics analysis. It will be held in the Medical Sciences Teaching Centre (behind the Dunn School of Pathology on South Parks Road).

The day-long course is designed to be run in two sessions:

• The first session will introduce you to the many bioinformatics analysis tools that are now available on this web site. The course will also introduce you to EMBOSS Explorer - a suite of bioinformatics software intended largely as a replacement for GCG. You will be shown how to carry out some basic bioinformatics analyses - for example:
  
  
  • access the databases on our servers to retrieve sequence files
  • examine sequence file formats
  • run restriction analysis software
  • carry out sequence alignments and produce publishable images of the aligned sequences
  • search databases using BLAST
  
  It will also introduce you to other more specialised tools - BASE and MASCOT - that will allow you to analyse your microarray and proteomics data respectively.
  


• Second session: Some of the bioinformatics tools are only available on our Unix servers and the second session will introduce the Unix computing facilities available via your molbiol account. We will show you how to connect to the CBRG Unix machines and introduce you to the Unix environment in general.
  You will be introduced to some of the features of the programs from the morning session that are not available via the web. There will be a brief introduction to the Staden package of software used for the analysis of dna sequencing chromatograms.

The course is not intended to be a comprehensive guide to all the bioinformatics packages available at the CBRG. Instead it is designed to show you the kind of analysis software that is available to you via your account. It should ensure that you also know where to look to find similar software on the CBRG web site and on orac and to find help with any of the software on the system.

In 2005 we introduced a large number of changes to the way bioinformatics is carried out using your molbiol account. With the many tools now available via this web site and advice on how to use the new server "orac", many long-term users may also benefit from attendance on this course.