Week 9 - Introduction to Next Generation Sequencing

There have been several revolutions in DNA sequencing technologies over the last 20 years that have transformed biological research, redefining not just how things are done, but the very nature of what experiments are possible. In particular the ready availability of high fidelity, high throughput DNA seqeuncing at low cost has both democratised research and allowed us to look into biological systems in unprecedented detail. This week we will introduce you to the background of NGS to prepare you for next week when we will be carrying out some NGS analysis with real world data.

Lecture 9 - Introduction to Next Generation Sequencing

The lecture slides for Week 9 are available here.

The video of the lecture is available from the GitHub video area here.

Introduction

There have been several revolutions in DNA sequencing technologies over the last 20 years that have transformed biological research, redefining not just how things are done, but the very nature of what experiments are possible. In particular the ready availability of high fidelity, high throughput DNA seqeuncing at low cost has both democratised research and allowed us to look into biological systems in unprecedented detail. There are entire courses dedicated to the analysis of data from sequencing technologies and we will not be able to go into the same detail as those. However, we feel that it is essential that any course teaching bioinformatics today needs to at least familiarise students with the technologies, their potential, application, and the some of the downstream analysis possible. Following this course you may well want to learn more, one excellent second semester course available in Edinburgh is Next Generation Genomics.

There is an excellent relevant Chapter in our course textbook, Pevsner, for this and next week - Chapter 9 - "Analysis of Next-Generation Sequence Data"

Reading Lists & Resources

Each week we will have an accompanying reading list with some articles & web-sites for self study to support the course. You can find the course "Resource List" - here. We will continue to curate the list throughout the course especially if things pop up in the lectures and practicals that we want to add a reference or link to so do please check back in on the list from time to time.

We have generally tried to identify resources as "Essential", "Recommended" or "Further Reading" in an attempt to help you prioritise your reading during the course.

Finally a very important time to draw your attention to what you can consider the "core text" for the course, which is the excellent "Bioinformatics & Functional Genomics" Third Edition by Jonathan Pevsner. You will be pleased to know that this text-book is available free online as part of the University's subscription portfolio. You can find it right at the top of the resource list. If you have any problems accessing or using any of the above please do drop us a comment in the Discussion forum and we will try to get things resolved as soon as possible.