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Bioinformatics

Resources for those interested in the subject of bioinformatics, the interdisciplinary science that uses information technology to solve molecular biology problems.

NEW BASIC SCIENCES GUIDE AVAILABLE NOW

A new Basic Sciences Guide has been created, which includes information presented on this guide. The new guide can be found at https://guides.lib.umich.edu/basicsciences. Please update any relevant bookmarks to the new guide. This guide will be retired in the future.  Questions or feedback? Please email THSL-BasicSciences@umich.edu

2021 NCBI Workshops

In June 2021, the University of Michigan Taubman Health Sciences Library partnered with NCBI to offer a series of 4 virtual workshops on NCBI resources.  More about these sessions and access to the handouts and recordings are below.

  • NCBI Resources for Genetic Disease Discovery and Clinical Support

The use of genetic testing in patient care is becoming more common in clinical practice. NCBI has long had resources for biologists to explore what is known about genomes, genes and genetic variations, but has recently developed clinically-focused resources. This online, interactive workshop was designed for those involved in clinical practice and/or translational research.

Workshop materials

  • NCBI Genome Resources for Animal Model Organism Research

This online, interactive workshop focused on NCBI’s web-based resources for accessing and analyzing genome assemblies and annotation data, with an emphasis on nonhuman organisms. It covered several NCBI databases, including Genome, Assembly, BioProject, Taxonomy, Gene, and SRA. It also briefly discussed NCBI’s analysis and standalone tools, such as the Genome Data Viewer (GDV), SRA Toolkit and MagicBLAST.

Workshop materials

  • An Update on NCBI BLAST and Other Sequence Analysis Tools

This virtual workshop highlighted new displays and features and introduced best practices for use of NCBI BLAST services. It covered when and how to use important but often misunderstood aspects of the BLAST programs, specialized services, and databases. It explored other important sequence analysis services, including Primer BLAST, an oligonucleotide primer designer and specificity checker, and COBALT, a multiple protein sequence alignment tool. Finally, it included brief demonstrations of standalone BLAST and related tools, including SRAToolkit BLAST and MagicBLAST.

Workshop materials

  • Getting Started with NCBI Data in Python

Learn how to tackle bigger biomolecular datasets more reliably with the power of Python programming. This workshop was designed for biologists without programming experience. The examples used genomic, transcript, and protein sequence data, but the programming skills were broadly relevant for all biologists. This online, interactive workshop covered how to:

  • Use Python programming to download, analyze, and visualize data.
  • Use Jupyter to create data analysis 'lab notebooks' that make it easy to reproduce & share your work.
  • Find data that is relevant to your project using the new NCBI Datasets resource. Explore metadata to learn about which datasets are available.
  • Download sequence data with NCBI Datasets and manipulate it with the BioPython package.

Workshop materials

2018 NCBI Workshops

In October 2018, the University of Michigan Taubman Health Sciences Library hosted Peter Cooper and Rana Morris from NCBI for a 2-day NCBI Discovery Workshop.  More about these sessions and access to the handouts are below.

2016 NCBI Workshops

In October 2016, the University of Michigan Taubman Health Sciences Library hosted Wayne Matten from NCBI for a 2.5-day NCBI Discovery Workshop.  More about these sessions and access to the handouts are below. 

2015 NCBI Workshops

In May 2015, the University of Michigan Taubman Health Sciences Library and Department of Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics hosted Peter Cooper from NCBI for a 2-day NCBI Discovery Workshop.  More about these sessions and access to the handouts are below. 

2012 NCBI Workshops

In May 2012, the University of Michigan Taubman Health Sciences Library and Department of Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics hosted Peter Cooper from NCBI for a 2-day NCBI Discovery Workshop.  More about these sessions is below.