The ACGT in collaboration with the UP IRT for Genomics and CBIO (UCT) hosted two Galaxy and NGS workshops in October 2013. The Pretoria event was held at the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Unit at UP from the 14th -18th October. The Cape Town leg was hosted by CBIO (UCT) from the 21st-25thOctober.
A total of 57 delegates were trained in total at both events (25 in Pretoria and 32 in Cape Town). Applicants were rigorously screened based on the relevance and impact of the course on their current research. Attendance at the Pretoria event was representative of all five ACGT partner institutions. In addition delegates were also selected from UNISA and the National Zoological Gardens.
The five day hands on workshop was presented by Mr David Clements, who is part of the Galaxy development team (Oregon, USA). He was assisted by Prof Fourie Joubert (Pretoria) and Mr Gerrit Botha (Cape Town) who presented the SNP and variant analysis tutorial. Topics included RNA Seq, NGS data quality control, SNP and variant analysis, ChIP Seq, genome assembly, customizing Galaxy and installing Galaxy on Amazon web services.
Participants at both the Pretoria and Cape Town events found the course to be relevant to their research and well presented. The outstanding presentations and active attention and participation of the delegates were major factors in the events success.
The workshops presented forms part of a series of bioinformatics training courses hosted by ACGT and its partners to address specific needs in bioinformatics skills training. For more information on upcoming bioinformatics training events, visit the events page on the ACGT website or like us on Facebook.