As part of the ACGT’s drive to build a sense of community among national proteomics stakeholders and address training needs in the field, a Proteomics Bioinformatics Workshop was recently held at the University of Pretoria’s Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Unit (BCBU).
The three-day workshop was facilitated by Prof Lennart Martens, a world-renowned bioinformatics expert, who is affiliated to the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) and Ghent University, Belgium. The Workshop was a logical continuation of training hosted by the ACGT, and linked very well to the national workshop facilitated by Prof Kathryn Lilley, of Cambridge University, hosted in the two-week period preceding.
The workshop covered a range of topics, which included the principles of mass spectrometry and proteomics. This was an excellent introduction for those who are in the initial stages of their proteomics experiments. These principles were also important for considering different statistical approaches to data analysis; which were covered in detail later in the workshop.
The workshop included daily practical sessions following introduction of different proteomics principles and considerations in the lecture sessions. Course participants were also introduced to open source software developed by Prof Martens and his team.
Feedback from participants was extremely positive. Some of the participants had this to say about the workshop:
– “The workshop was of a very high quality and was very professionally organised and presented.”
– “Prof Lennart Martens is a true expert in Proteomics-Bioinformatics field. For someone like myself without a lot of background in the field, to be able to follow and understand his lectures says it all.”
– “It was an excellent experience to attend this workshop. I really appreciate efforts put by ACGT and CSIR to bring researchers together to attend these workshops. Thank you very much.”
The participants included students as well as principal investigators who have been active in the field for some time. With the ACGT’s efforts of trying to reach the proteomics community at a national level, the participants included delegates from the ACGT partner institutions as well as other institutes such as the University of the Western Cape and the University of Fort Hare.
The ACGT is currently planning the proteomics workshops and training events for 2014. For more information on all proteomics related events, please contact Mr Thabo Khoza at .
Please also visit (and join) the LinkedIn page: Proteomics SA.