Report from the online course on NGS and bioinformatics
Short review and participant feedback to the course organised by WG1
In the two-day online course, a total of 28 registered participants engaged in theoretical sessions and practical exercises focusing on Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies, DNA template preparation, and bioinformatics pipelines. The expert instructors Ricardo Jorge Lopes, Luz Garcia-Longoria Batanete and Nayden Chakarov of WIMANET working group 1 provided support in hands-on exercises, and particularly also providing troubleshooting for problems that can occur when working with malaria parasite.
By the end of the course, participants were providing the following feedback:
- This course was very well conceptualized and executed! It gave some practical insights and made me work on parasite genome, I feel that it was very useful to me!
- This course is suitable for someone who would like to practice the beginning bioinformatic and basic analysis on NGS.
- Attending the WIMANET workshop was a valuable experience. It provided a great opportunity to learn and connect with experts and peers in Malaria field. I look forward to attending more such informative workshops in the future.
- I found the whole course very satisfying, rich in information. Thanks to this course, I was able to understand all the scientific beauty behind the sequencing tools. I’m very proud to have taken part in this course.
- This course offered by WG1 was a fantastic experience, giving me the opportunity to deepen my understanding of genomics from a parasitologist’s perspective.
So all in all, the WG1 online course I was a success, providing participants with valuable skills, and the attendees left with a solid foundation in sequencing and bioinformatics for working with malaria parasites of wildlife hosts.
The presentations from the online course can be found here and an additional document with the program as well as links to code and resources here.