Driven by the technological progress, biology continuously undergoes a revolution that started in the late 1990s with the sequencing of the human genome. This revolution is on a scale that constantly redefines our basic understanding of biology and reaches deep into human and animal science, for example with respect to diseases and nutrition. Understanding the opportunities that come with the technological development is crucial for strategy planning and experiment design.
The course will focus on bulk RNA sequencing of large pools of cells such as tissues, cell populations or blood. A complementary course is dedicated to single cell RNA sequencing. We will introduce tools to analyze the high-throughput sequencing data generated from a selected range of technologies with high relevance for human and animal science. To this end, basic concepts of sequence alignment and genome analysis will be introduced with focus on transcriptomics (e.g., gene expression, genomic and transcriptomic variation). Furthermore, the functional context of genes will be addressed through the studies of biochemical pathways and networks, in which information from sequencing data will be employed to interpret the functional aspects of genes. Major software tools introduced and applied during the course are the web-based platforms Galaxy and UCloud for running data intensive bioinformatic analysis pipelines, the statistical software R for statistical computing, and Cytoscape for visualization and interpretation of biological networks.