Skill Training Workshop (ST) 2 in Frankfurt in September 2014

In ST2 the groups of Ingo Ebersberger at the Goethe University Frankfurt and Wolfram Weckwerth from the University of Vienna, supported by Stefanie Tauber from the IMB Mainz, provided training in statistics, bioinformatics, and systems biology. The five-day course from September 16th to 20th 2014 brought together 16 participants, including the ESRs and ERs from the ITN CALIPSO as well as external researchers from Krakow, Munich, and Vienna. The course started off with an introduction into basic statistics and the statistical programming language R. The subsequent sessions covered methods and approaches in explorative data analysis and statistical testing. Concepts and hands on in Gene set enrichment analyses concluded the statistical part. The bioinformatics part concentrated on concepts and methods in biological sequence analysis. The range of topics covered extended from an introduction into sequence evolution via homology inferences to alignment and annotation of sequences, and eventually phylogenetic tree reconstruction. Central to the course was not only the introduction of individual methods but also of approaches to assess the credibility of the results obtained from the bioinformatics analyses. The third part of the course focused on the principles of Systems Biology. Among the topics covered were Proteomics and Metabolomics technologies as well as principles in data mining with a focus on data alignment and data integration.