'Bioinformatics for Wet-Lab Biologists'

Location: Sir Kenneth and Lady Noreen Murray Seminar room, CTIR 2.84, Discovery Centre.

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Meeting ID: 323 063 937 690
Passcode: whGyzH

Hosts: Professor Doreen Cantrell & Dr Henry McSorley

Abstract:

Omics is becoming increasingly ubiquitous to the life sciences. Indeed, it is now unusual for labs to never have been involved in an omic project. Perhaps surprisingly, the time and often cost bottleneck for omic projects is increasingly the downstream data analysis. This analysis requires a completely different skillset to wet-lab work, and is focussed on coding in R, the bioinformatic equivalent of a pipette.  

This bottleneck is compounded by the fact that globally many undergraduate and masters' courses don't teach extensive R and bioinformatics, it is extremely expensive to outsource entire omic research projects and can sometimes be unreliable, there are few bioinformatic training courses for PhD students and post-docs that are targeted at wet-lab scientists, and there is a shortage of trained bioinformaticians. Resultantly, the data analysis bottleneck is an underappreciated issue in research. A recent Nature survey showed that 51% of post-docs feel there most lacking skillset is computational. 

Our group in University of Glasgow is focussed on trying to help solve this issue, by creating software aimed at helping wet-lab scientists perform bioinformatics analysis without needing to learn coding. But also, by providing a 2–6-week bioinformatic training programme aimed exclusively at wet-lab scientists. I.e., its low cost (£150pw), mornings only, via zoom, highly rated (mean 9.5 / 10 over 287 reviews) and is focussed on equipping people with the skills to perform their own omic analysis.