The African Centre for Gene Technologies (ACGT) together with the University of Pretoria’s Centre for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (CBCB) and the CISCO Networking Academy, have been hosting the annual Linux for Life Scientists Workshops for three straight years now. This year’s course was facilitated fully online; a completely different format from that of previous years due to the current COVID-19 situation.
Advancements in sequencing platforms and the amount of data generated require specialized skills and programs that generally require some knowledge of command-line. Linux is one such useful alternative operating system for data analysis and visualization. Researchers use open-source Linux to analyse the huge amounts of data they generate on multiple platforms. Linux is an alternative to expensive vendor-specific software that require periodic license renewals.
The workshop was facilitated by Mr Shaheem Sadien (CISCO Networking Academy) and Professor Fourie Joubert (University of Pretoria). The Linux course facilitated over five webinars spread out over 2 weeks in May 2020. The first webinar served as an introduction to Linux and the rest of the webinars that followed covered navigation, essential commands, resources, clusters and queuing. The workshop participants were representative of all ACGT partner institutions (ARC, CSIR, UJ, UP and Wits), as well as the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), Tshwane University of Technology (TUT), University of Cape Town (UCT) and University of the Western Cape (UWC).
The ACGT wishes to thank Mr Molati Nonyane, Ms Itseng Malao, Mr Shaheem Sadien and Prof Fourie Joubert for course content and organization. The ACGT is looking to host another iteration of this course in 2020. Kindly contact our Liaison Scientist, Mr Molati Nonyane (molati.nonyane@up.ac.za) in this regard. The ACGT plans to continue with these kinds capacity building efforts to improve the skills level of South African scientists, especially in the field of bioinformatics and data analysis.
