Date: Wednesday, May 18, 2016
Time: 3:30pm-5:30pm
Location: VC 115
Instructor: Adam Rosebrock

Description: Over the past decade, the development and large-scale deployment of multiple “next generation” technologies has revolutionized the process of sequencing nucleic acids. Since the turn of the millennia, sequencing throughput has evolved from megabases to terabases of information per machine*week and has diversified from one dominant technology to a half-dozen fundamentally different measurement techniques and sample preparation approaches. Although sequence analysis begins for most computational biologists at the common currency of the FASTA/FASTQ file, understanding how these reads were generated is an important part of interpreting sequencing data.

In this two-hour tutorial, I will present the theory and practical considerations of several classic and next-generation sequencing technologies with a specific focus on issues relevant to computational biologists. Participants will gain a mechanistic understanding of next-generation sequencing and biological sample preparation and build a core vocabulary to enable communication across the “wet-dry” divide. Students will be exposed to outstanding problems and caveats of current sequencing approaches and will hopefully be inspired to consider new computational approaches to identify, circumvent, and ultimately correct extant issues with state-of-the-art approaches.

Mirroring how many wet-lab biologists view informatics tools as an impenetrable black box, many computational biologists view sequencing as closed, idealized process. The goal of this session is to provide computational biologists with a working knowledge of the biology and technology underlying sequencing and take the lid off of the black box!

Prerequisites: None