Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

The use of high-throughput sequencing technologies, such as those used to sequence DNA or RNA, is rapidly increasing the amount of data generated in human and health research projects, especially projects focused on disease diagnosis and treatment. This amount of data requires bioinformatics skills to handle and analyze and to navigate the results. Health researchers recognize that bioinformatics skills are fundamental to the success of their projects given the complexity of the human genome. Acquiring the level of advanced bioinformatics skills specific to health research is challenging as comprehensive training programs are scarce and the field is rapidly advancing. The Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops (CBW) proposal herein seeks to disseminate its leading edge bioinformatics knowledge and skill to health researchers through a workshop series focused on bioinformatics skills necessary to Canadian health scientists. Specifically, the proposal seeks to support trainee attendance at these essential skills workshops. The series will feature 10 short format, hands-on workshops designed to guide researchers through the key bioinformatics concepts and tools required to analyze the large datasets generated by advancing high-throughput sequencing technologies. Participants gain experience in working with various -omics datasets, the data visualization tools commonly used in complex analyses, strategies for pathway analysis and functional evaluation on the resultant variant list, and integration of clinical data. By providing a comprehensive program of workshops in health research-specific bioinformatics tools, the series has been shown to enhance the informatic skill set of the research community in Canada, thereby enabling translational research and personalized therapy discoveries.