A number of H3Africa members expressed an interest in and need for basic Bioinformatics training for individuals entering the discipline, or for those who need a basic foundational understanding of Bioinformatics before moving on to more complex areas. A task force, from the H3ABioNet Education and Training Working Group, has therefore developed an Introduction to Bioinformatics course in order to meet this need.

A distance-based learning model is used for this course. Classrooms are set up at different sites (which meet certain infrastructure requirements) and link to the trainer via the  Adobe connect conferencing system  during biweekly contact sessions. 

To ensure that internet instability is not a barrier to education, lectures are pre-recorded, downloaded, and watched locally in classrooms.

There are appropriately trained local teaching assistants at each of the sites to assist with the practical components of the course, which run using online tools as far as possible.

There is no application or participation fee. Local sites provide the physical resources for the course and the course core team provides logistic and course management support via the Vula platform.

 

By the end of the course participants should be able to:

• Explain the use of Bioinformatics
• Name key Bioinformatics techniques and tools
• Locate important biological databases and retrieve data
• Use selected tools effectively to run specific Bioinformatics analyses
• Understand the strengths and limitations of the various techniques

• Biological databases and resources (NCBI, EBI)
• Advanced literature searching – PubMed
• DNA analysis – e.g. sequence features, start site, restriction sites etc
• Protein function classification

• Introduction to Linux, UNIX and the command line
• Manipulating files – useful commands and tips
• Permissions, groups, and process control

• Introduction to searching and sequence alignment
• Pairwise sequence alignment
• BLAST algorithm

• Applications of multiple sequence alignment
• Choosing the right sequences with the right software

• Genome sequences – sequencing technology and brief NGS overview
• Genome browsers and annotation
• Comparative Genomics
• Human variation

• Historical perspective, mechanisms of molecular evolution, and speciation.
• Traits, phylogenies, evolutionary models and divergence times.
• Tree building with distance matrix methods. Parsimony approaches.
• Tree building with maximum likelihood approaches. Bayesian viewpoint. Branch support measures.