Biology used to be a lab-intensive science, but not any more. The skills needed for successful research changed due to the advent of next-generation sequencing (NGS). These days many biologists have large volumes of NGS data sitting in their hard-drives, but do not have the necessary computing skills to analyze them. These tutorials are expected to help them at all levels.
Biologists without any prior coding experience should start with these tutorials. "Absolute Beginner's Guide to Bioinformatics - 1 and 2" provide general introduction to a range of topics - (i) NCBI and other databases, (ii) BLAST, MUSCLE and other programs, (iii) git and github, (iv) linux, (v) R, (vi) Python, etc so that a beginner can put them in the right context. This introduction should be subsequently followed by learning a language (R or Python). The tutorials "R for Biology" and "Python for Biology" are available for the beginners.
Our intermediate level tutorials help those with some familiarity of R or Python.
These days thousands of biologists have high-throughput (NGS) data sitting in their hard-drives, but do not have the necessary computing skills to analyze it. Among various types of NGS data, the most popular request we receive from our members is regarding RNAseq analysis. These tutorials cover all learning steps for a biologist without any prior computational expertise to analyze RNAseq data.
These tutorials tutorials cover assembly algorithms for the genomes and transcriptomes. First, we present a jigsaw puzzle to explain the assembly process. Then we cover algorithms for short (primarily Illumina) and long noisy (Pacbio, Oxford Nanopore) reads.
Bioinformatics programs processing large volume of sequence data implement a number of elegant algorithms. They are covered in these tutorials. Additionally, video tutorials from two Coursera courses on bioinformatics algorithms are posted here.