Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

With almost all health and life-science research today requiring skills in bioinformatics analyses, training and skill development in bioinformatics is critical. Two barriers are frequently encountered in realizing training in bioinformatics for all researchers: 1) language of training delivery; and 2) programming skill requirement. For example, despite the fact that 22% of Canadians are Francophone and nearly 29% can speak French, French-language bioinformatics training is quite difficult to find in Canada. Moreover, the vast majority of available bioinformatics training relies on participants having pre-existing programming skills. Many researchers interested in expanding their computational biology toolkits have very limited programming experience or none at all, which presents a major barrier to their research. To ensure that French-speaking Canadian researchers have the expertise in bioinformatics required to lead cutting-edge research, regardless of their programming experience, the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops (CBW) is seeking funding from CIHR to support the development and delivery of a three-day RNA-seq Analysis Using Galaxy en Français workshop. CBW has not offered French-language training in the past, nor have we offered RNA-seq training without programming prerequisites, so this training will be unique. Through lectures and hands-on labs using real health research data, participants will learn the key elements of RNA-seq analysis using Galaxy, a comprehensive web-based bioinformatics platform. They will learn the principles of designing robust RNA-seq experiments and library preparation before diving into navigating databases and downloading data, performing quality control and expression analyses using Galaxy, performing enrichment analysis and clustering, and visualizing results. This comprehensive curriculum delivered in French will empower participants to perform high-quality RNA-seq analysis from bench design to bioinformatics analysis.