Bioinformatics Workshops & Training
woman taking notes while in a Zoom meeting

Hosting regular virtual, hands-on workshops.
Workshops

The Bioinformatics Core hosts regular virtual, hands-on workshops.

  • See our EventBrite page for current workshop schedules, details, and registration.
  • Workshops are online and are conducted over Zoom and Slack.
  • We provide a server environment and a login, sample data, and required software.
  • The workshop experience is designed to be interactive and includes live-coding and opportunities for questions throughout.
  • The workshop are recorded and the recordings are available to those who attend the workshop.

Recurring workshops:

Computational Foundations

An introduction to the most important and common Unix shell commands and techniques as well as an overview of using R/R-Studio for importing, transforming, and plotting for data analysis. Prior coding/scripting experience is not required.

Link to lesson plans

 

RNA-Seq Demystified

A step-by-step guide to  the analysis of differential gene expression in bulk RNA-Seq data. 

Link to lesson plans

By the end of the workshop series, attendees will be able to:

  • Use the command line and R to navigate, analyze, and visualize data files.
  • Transform raw sequencing data into annotated differential expression values using a suite of open-source tools.
  • Visualize and interpret common data quality problems and understand their impact and possible mitigations.
This workshop assumes a basic knowledge of genetics and prior enrollment in a Computational Foundations workshop, Software Carpentry workshop, or equivalent experience.

 

Intro to Single-Cell Analysis

A step-by-step guide to the analysis of single-cell RNA-Seq data. 

Link to lesson plans

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

  • Describe how single-cell samples are sequenced along with strengths of a few popular library preps.
  • Create and interpret preliminary QC visualizations from a single-cell experiment.
  • Use PCA and UMAP to create cell-type clusters.
  • Identify marker genes and annotate clusters based on gene expression.
  • Execute and visualize differential expression across clusters.
This workshop assumes a basic knowledge of genetics and prior enrollment in a Computational Foundations workshop, Software Carpentry workshop, or equivalent experience.

 

Coming soon: Computational Reproducibility at UM
This workshop is for University of Michigan researchers who manage lots of data and/or execute compute-intensive analyses. It illustrates best practices around data management, software management, and task automation in the UM IT ecosystem.

At the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:

  • Manage software requirements in a modular, portable fashion using modules (lmod), Conda, and containers (Docker/Singularity).
  • Submit jobs to GreatLakes using basic SLURM commands (e.g. squeue) and also using workflow managers (e.g. Snakemake).
  • Describe data storage resources available at UM, best practices for different kinds of data, and how to use Globus to transfer and share data.
This workshop assumes a basic knowledge of genetics and prior enrollment in a Computational Foundations workshop, Software Carpentry workshop, or equivalent experience.
Other Resources

University of Michigan resources for data-intensive research: 

Public resources on bioinformatics analysis in general:
Contact Us
North Campus Research Complex (NCRC), Building 22
2800 Plymouth Road
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2800
About Us
The Bioinformatics Core is one of the Biomedical Research Core Facilities, and a part of the Medical School Office of Research, where our mission is to foster an environment of innovation and efficiency that serves the Michigan Medicine research community and supports biomedical science from insight to impact.