Lecture: Wednesday 11-13h Tutorial: Thursday, 8-9h Attention: the lecture will start on Wednesday, September 27. Lecture and tutorial will be held on-site with streaming via Zoom.
This course is an introduction to the wide field of Genomics. It addresses how fundamental questions in biological systems are studied using methods in genomics and how the resulting data is analysed to make quantitative interpretations of biological phenomena.
Learning objective
The goal of this course is to get detailed insights in how state-of-the-art DNA sequencing technologies can be applied for a qualitative and quantitative description of molecular and cellular processes and function. Students will learn how to analyse RNA-seq / transcriptomics data and make biological interpretations in a quantitative manner.
Content
This course will be a mix of lecture sessions, hands-on computational data analysis using public datasets and seminars discussing own results in the context of the published studies. In the lectures we will introduce current Next-Generation Sequencing technologies and their application to address basically all facets of modern biology and biomedical research. We will cover the major sample processing methods used for investigating functional genomic aspects like transcriptome and chromatin profiling, review recent advances in (cancer) genome sequencing and give an overview of public big data sequencing projects (ENCODE, GTEX, TCGA, ...). For the computational data analysis we will focus on differential gene expression profiling (RNA-seq) experiments that have been selected from fascinating published biological studies. Data analysis based on R will follow a detailed tutorial describing all required steps of sequence read processing and will be conducted in small groups to enable every student hands-on experience.
Lecture notes
The PowerPoint presentations of the lectures as well as other course material relevant for an active participation will be made available online.
Performance assessment
Performance assessment information (valid until the course unit is held again)
Performance assessment as a semester course