This is an entry level course aimed that those with a reasonable biological background but no significant experience with bioinformatics. The course is broadly based around a series of exercises in which a combination of simple analytical tools and reference to publicly available databases is applied to the investigation of a single human gene. The training manual for the course is comprised of detailed instructions for the tasks undertaken. Included are, questions (with answers) and discussion of and the interpretation of the results achieved.

Participants are asked to imagine an interest in the disease aniridia. Course exercises then provide extremely detailed instruction leading participants to discover the gene primarily associated with this disease and all that is interesting about that gene and its protein products.

This course will also provide a soft introduction to Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) data analysis. This part of the course aims at providing basic skills that are needed when one needs to process NGS data, such as evaluating data quality, trimming sequences, changing data formats, visualising data, etc. Then, participants will learn how to address a simple transcriptomics problem, stepwise, using open source bioinformatics tools.