Short courses in 'Practical High Throughput Bioinformatics'

Bioinformatics in essence, is the use of computers for the analysis and management of biological data. As biological research embraces new techniques and new technologies, the data being generated increases continually both in terms of the absolute volume and in the speed of its creation. In order to understand the biological meaning of these data we need to be able to efficiently analyse them, and to do this we use bioinformatics. The necessary analyses are also increasing in size and complexity as our knowledge and data increase, and also as new methods of analysis are discovered. Larger data sets and more complex analyses are using ever-increasing computer resources and recently e-science reseach has produced new methods to spread the computing load across a community of computers, perhaps on different sites, rather than relying on individual ones. We aim to produce a training course which will assist bioinformaticians, particularly those starting out on their career to learn the use of some of these new methods in order to improve their research and ability to handle the ever increasing volumes of data efficiently.

This project aims to produce a new set of training materials suitable for production of a one week intensive training course on 'practical high throughput methodologies for bioinformatics'. The proposed course is aimed primarily at bioinformaticians (particularly young ones) who need a rapid focussed practical introduction to the application of some of the newer methodologies coming out of the high throughput and e-science arenas into the bioinformatics arena - such as job scheduling and management using grid engine, GLOBUS and CONDOR, web services, Distributed annotation systems (DAS) and AccessGrid. The course will be carefully tailored using examples specfically drawn from common bioinformatics tasks and scenarios and will be developed and taught jointly by a group comprising computer scientists who develop, deliver and maintain the technologies in question and bioinformaticians who use and support them in current bioinformatics research applications