IMPORTANT DATES for this Course 
Deadline for applications: *September 27th 2013* 
Notification of acceptance within 72 hours of application (working days count) 
Course date: *October 8th to October 11th 2013* 

Details about the course including instructions on how to apply can be found in the appropriate page of the GTPB website 

http://gtpb.igc.gulbenkian.pt/bicourses/WESRDA13/ 

We hope that you enjoy it. 

Best regards 
Pedro Fernandes 
GTPB organiser 
Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência 
Apartado 14 
2781-901 OEIRAS 
PORTUGAL 
Tel +351 21 4407912 
http://gtpb.igc.gulbenkian.pt 

Course description 
High-throughput technologies such as next generation sequencing (NGS) are characterized for producing massive a mounts of data. These technologies for example can allow to describe all variants in a genome or to detect the whole set of transcripts that are present in a cell or tissue. However, at the same time, posses new challenges in the way the data has to be analyzed, annotated and interpreted which are not trivial. 

Whole Exome Sequencing produces sequence data using NGS assays and allows the study of genetic variations in the exonic regions of all genes that can be transformed in biological information at an unprecedented level of detail. Traditionally transcriptomic analysis has been used to find genes that are differentially expressed among distinct experimental conditions, or correlated to diverse parameters. Currently, NGS technologies such as RNA-seq can also allow to digitally quantify all, known and unknown, transcripts or to discover new isoforms and splice sites for all the genes. 

However, NGS data analysis can be a major bottleneck for many researchers which are still applying inefficient tools for the processing of the data and inadequate methods for the interpretation of their results in order to have meaningful results. This course covers state-of-the-art tools and methods for NGS RNA-seq and exome variant data analysis, which are of major relevance in today's genomic and gene expression studies. 

The aim of this course is to familiarise course participants with the latest analysis methodologies and to provide hands-on training on the analytical approaches implemented for RNA-seq data and whole exome variant analysis.