The rapid advancement of Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) has opened a wealth of opportunities for research in many fields: cancer biology, epigenetics, tumor evolution, microbiome and infectious disease dynamics, neuro-degeneration, personalized medicine, and improved diagnosis and risk assessment for patients. Moreover, there are emerging, faster NGS technologies that promise comprehensive molecular portraits of disease and actionable clinical results for doctors within a single day. Scientists and physicians will be better equipped to design studies and help patients if they possess an intricate knowledge of these molecular-profiling methods, their biological context and their applicability to specific cases and diseases. Finally, a rich understanding of the complexity of the human genome is essential for the proper annotation of characterization of any new mutations/modifications found, since large-scale efforts at tumor and normal genome sequencing have dramatically altered our view of the “normal” genome and epigenome.
Thus, in this 10-week course, students will build a strong foundation of knowledge of NGS technologies (both existing and emerging), learn the applications of these technologies for basic and clinical research, and finally learn the essential tools for the analysis, integration, and application of these data relative to other public databases and phenotype repositories. We have a broad range of expertise being contributed from many leaders in the field.