Course description

This five day course introduces various databases and data analysis tools to get grips on the
big data in the life sciences.

The course consists of two parts: Part 1 (day 1-3) introduces the advanced uses of the gene and genomes databases, small molecule resources, the protein sequence databases, and interaction and pathway databases at EBI (a.o. UniPROT, ENSEMBL, CHEMBL, IntAct and Reactome). This first part is an EBI Roadshow hosted by UM & NBIC. Part 2 (day 4-5) focuses on real data analysis using pathway and network approaches with links to the databases covered in first part. Tools that will be used include WikiPathways, PathVisio and Cytoscape. Covered aspects include pathway creation, data preparation for analysis, pathway analysis, network analysis and network extension using target information. This second part is provided by the department of Bioinformatics-BiGCaT at Maastricht University in collaboration with the diXa FP7 project on systems biology approaches in toxicogenomics. The diXa project will provide examples about (re)use and (re)analysis of large genomics datasets.