The bioinformatics workshop for experimentalists was held at QIAGEN Aarhus from Monday 21st to Wednesday 23rd November 2016. The 14 participants were trained on the effective use of the central server for sharing data within the consortium and performing data analysis tasks with user-friendly bioinformatics tools through a mixture of lectures, tutorials and hands-on experience in an interactive setting.
Day 1:
The first part of the workshop focused on technical aspects of the server architecture and provided help with completing the software installations of the current Genomics Workbench (GxWB 9.5.2), the latest build of the Microbial Genomics Module (MGM 1.99 beta) and the server-client plugin.
Day 2:
The 2nd day of workshop started with lectures on taxonomic profiling, read-mapping and de-novo assembly of NGS reads, followed by a session covering the Genome finishing module to help with the assembly of contigs. The afternoon provided an overview of the different aspects of the Microbial Genomics Module and concluded with a hands-on session where participants could go through the provided tutorials at their own pace. Experts from QIAAR were around to help out with any questions arising.
Day 3:
The last day of the workshop continued with the hands-on tutorials in an informal and interactive setting, followed by a session on visualisation aspects of biological datasets in general and biological (i.e. metabolic) networks in particular. The workshop concluded with a feedback session, conducted in the style of an agile retrospective by QIAARs user-experience (UX) expert, assisted by the MGM product owner, support and project manager.
