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A five days theoretical and practical course on microarray data analysis oriented to experimentalists, end-users and PhD students who want to learn about the state-of-the-art of the data analysis methodologies in this fast changing area, and acquire the skills necessary for analysing their own data using one of the most advanced software packages, the GEPAS.
Organized by
Joaquín Dopazo, Fátima Al-Shahrour, David Montaner, Ana Conesa
Department of Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics Node (INB)
Centro de Investigación Príncipe Felipe (CIPF) 46013, Valencia, Spain
Teachers
Fátima Al-Shahrour
Ana Conesa
Stefan Götz
Joaquín Dopazo
Jaime Huerta
David Montaner
Pablo Mínguez
Ignacio Medina
Susana Vega
(Bioinformatics Department, CIPF, Valencia)
Summary
DNA microarrays constitute, no doubt, a paradigm among post-genomic technologies, which are characterised for producing large amounts of data, whose analysis and interpretation is not trivial. Microarray technologies allows querying living systems in a completely new way, but at the same time present new challenges in the way hypotheses must be tested and our results ought to be analysed.
Since the first papers published in the latest nineties the number of questions that have been addressed through this technique have both increased and diversified. Initial interest was focused on genes co-expressing across sets of experimental conditions, implying essentially the use of clustering techniques. More recently, however, the interest has switched to find genes differentially expressed among distinct classes of experiments, or correlated to diverse parameters. There is also much interest in robust methods for building predictors of clinical outcomes. Also, CGH-arrays (Albertson and Pinkel, 2003) are recently becoming an alternative for studying the relationship between chromosomal alterations affecting to copy number (which are behind many diseases) and gene expression. In addition, there is also a clear demand for methods that allow automatic transfer of biological information to the results of microarray experiments and to interpret them at the light of the biological knowledge. Recently, new methods of analysis have been proposed that directly address hypothesis on blocks of genes functionally related that have demonstrated to be superior to the classical one-gene-at-a-time approaches (Mootha et al., 2003; Al-Shahrour et al., 2007).
This course covers the state-of-the-art in the above mentioned topics, which are of major relevance in today's gene expression data analysis. Through sessions of theory and practical examples, the students will acquire the experience necessary to address scientific questions to gene expression array datasets and solve them. Special attention will be devoted to important (although not always took into account) aspects in microarray data analysis, such as multiple testing or functional profiling. In addition, some theoretical lessons on basic statistics will be included as part of the programme.
The course is designed to be a mixture of theoretical and practical sessions. The latter will require some familiarity with the use of web-based tools and knowledge of basics notions of statistics. Practical sessions will be carried out using the GEPAS (Herrero et al., 2003, 2004, Vaquerizas et al., 2005; Montaner et al., 2006) environment, an integrated web tool for microarray data analysis, the Babelomics suite (Al-Shahrour et al., 2005b, 2006) for functional profiling of genome-scale experiments, and the Blast2GO suite (Conesa et al., 2005), a set of tools for the high-throughput functional annotation and analysis of uncharacterized sequences.
The course will be held the week before fallas, one of the most popular and impressing folkloric festivals in Spain which en the 19th March when all the fallas are burn in an apotheosis of fireworks. So you can use this opportunity to enjoy one of the most exceptional holiday festival in the world.
More info
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