Welcome to the Harvard Informatics Bioinformatics Tips & Tricks workshop!

This web page will guide you through some of the activities we have planned for you today!

Instructors

Adam Freedman: A bioinformatics scientist in the FAS Informatics group at Harvard University.

Danielle Khost: A bioinformatics scientist in the FAS Informatics group at Harvard University.

Gregg Thomas: A bioinformatics scientist in the FAS Informatics group at Harvard University and recent postdoc at the University of Montana where he studied the phylogenetics and comparative genomics of the mouse and rat radiation. He got his PhD at Indiana University where he worked on comparative genomics of arthropods, mutation rate evolution in primates, and convergent evolution using comparative genomics. In general, Gregg uses and develops computational methods to study molecular evolution and phylogenetics to determine what forces drive divergence and adaptation between species.

Lei Ma received her PhD from the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering. Her dissertation focused on the ecology of marine microorganisms in coral reefs and in Atlantic killifish. She is particularly interested in genotype-environment-microbiome interactions in animal hosts, such as the influence of host evolution on its microbiome. Other interests include mentoring, finding coding shortcuts, cats, video games, sci-fi, and knitting.

Workshop Summary & Outline

This workshop aims to introduce students to some basic bioinformatics file formats, tools, and general best practices. The first two days of the workshop will be dedicated to introductions of bioinformatics file formats and the command line tools that we use to view, manipulate, and analyze them. After that, we will begin to shift from using individual commands to writing scripts.

Here is a brief outline of the topics we'll be covering:

Day 1: Bioinformatics Tools, part 1

Wednesday February 21st, 9:30 am - 12:30 pm
Location: Northwest Building room 453
  • Sequence files (FASTA, FASTQ)
  • Intro to commands useful for bioinformatics (grep, awk)
  • Alignment files (BAM/SAM) and samtools
  • Introduction to piping and redirecting

Day 2: Bioinformatics Tools, part 2

Thursday February 22nd, 9:30 am - 12:30 pm
Location: Biolabs room 2062/2064
  • More on piping and redirecting
  • Interval files (bed, GFF)
  • More on grep and awk
  • Introduction to bedtools

Day 3: Shell scripting, part 1

Wednesday February 28th, 9:30 am - 12:30 pm
Location: Northwest Building room 353 (NOTE ROOM CHANGE FROM DAY 1)
  • More about interval files (bed, GFF)
  • Variant files (VCF)
  • Introduction to bcftools
  • Shell scripting

Day 4: Shell scripting, part 2

Thursday February 29th, 9:30 am - 12:30 pm
Location: Biolabs room 2062/2064
  • Loops
  • Conditional statements
  • Handling command line arguments in shell scripts
  • Reproducibility best practices

Click the appropriate Get Started link below to read some info before class. Additional links to resources will appear for each day of the workshop.


Get Started


Get Started (no FAS RC account)