Plant Bioinformatics Workshop

JCVI recently held its 3rd Annual Plant Bioinformatics Workshop from July 15-19th. During the week-long workshop, 20 scientists from the Plant Research community visited JCVI and learned many aspects of Bioinformatics from the members of Chris Town’s Plant Genome group. Attendees included undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, research scientists and faculty at various Universities throughout the United States as well as a biotech company. In addition to the on-site participants, we had 5 additional participants attend the workshop via WebEx. The virtual participants had the opportunity to sit in on the lectures and complete the hands on exercises by logging into an Amazon Cloud instance, which was set up specifically for this purpose.

The topics covered during the workshop included UNIX tools for Bioinformatics, Genome Assembly, Structural and Functional Annotation, RNA-seq assembly and analysis and SNPs. In addition to JCVI’s instructors, we had additional sections covered by external instructors. Eric Lyons (University of Arizona and iPlant) presented on Comparative Genomics and the iPlant Infrastructure and Ann Loraine (UNC Charlotte) presented on Integrated Genome Browser. All sessions contained a hands-on component so the students would have the opportunity to use the tools that we discussed during the lecture portion. Watch our website for future offerings!