Bioinformatics has become an important part of many areas of health research. Several fields of research such as microbiome, cancer, immunology and clinical research are generating massive amounts of data that need appropriate computational tools for their analysis and interpretation. Moreover, a need for bioinformatics training is more pressing than ever as big data are more and more present in health research.

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Université Laval Big Data Research Centre, the Canada Excellence Research Chairs (CERC) Program, and CBW are offering a 4-day workshop centered on the microbiome. This workshop will provide an introduction to the use of bioinformatics in microbiome research as well as big data analytics applied to this field.

Participants will gain practical experience and skills to be able to:

Design appropriate microbiome-focused experiments
Understand the advantages and limitations of metagenomic data analysis
Devise an appropriate bioinformatics workflow for processing and analyzing metagenomic sequence data (marker-gene, shotgun metagenomic, and metatranscriptomic data)
Apply appropriate statistics to undertake rigorous data analysis
Visualize datasets to gain intuitive insights into the composition and/or activity of their data set
Use machine learning approaches to solve problems