At the roots of diversity…

Brief post from the sysadmin

We are testing some facebook integration plugins, in order to facilitate and automate the sharing of the content, so don’t be afraid if you see something strange.

By the way, any suggestions? Right now we are testing both sociable’s opengraph plugin and wordbooker.

Today, perhaps for the first time, Elena had lunch with us. We were really afraid she was going to starve one more day.

A few minutes later Vittorio came to the lunch room and he was ready to eat but suddenly he realised he was in a great danger: Federica had a whole melon with her and was cutting it. His face turned pale and before fainting he flew away to come back an hour later when the territory was free. Unfortunately we did not shot a picture at his face. It would have been memorable.

Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) has recently revolutionized the approach to genome sequencing enabling the sequencing of billions of bases in massively parallel reactions. These new sequencing technologies, collectively referred to as either ‘ultra-deep’ sequencing or ‘massively parallel’ sequencing, are currently used for SNP discovery, structural variants detection, genome-wide measurement of transcripts levels and a number of other applications and are revolutionizing biological research.

The course took place at Istituto di Genomica Applicata (IGA) and consisted of a general introduction to NGS technologies, an extensive wet-lab session focused on Illumina sequencing, an introduction to necessary hardware infrastructures, a basic course on Linux command line, a data analysis session comprehending sequence alignment, de novo assembly, SNP and structural variant detection, rare variants identification; finally, external speakers proved their experience on particular IT solutions, a particular tool for data analysis, Small RNA-seq, RNA-seq and target resequencing.

Finally, course attendees had the possibility to discuss personally with speakers and other attendees to exchange problems and ideas in a very stimulating environment.

We hope attendees enjoyed the course and will write their comments on the blog!