ELIXIR Italy, in collaboration with CINECA and Sapienza Università di Roma are organising traning course on NGS for evolutionary biologists: from basic scripting to variant calling.

This course will provide an introduction to next generation sequencing platforms, data analysis and tools for data quality control, including alignment to a reference sequence, data handling and visualisation, and variant calling and filtering (single nucleotide polymorphisms and structural variants). It will be deliver a mixture of lectures and hands-on sessions, including mini-projects to be completed by the participants. The topics covered include population structure and admixture, demographic changes and natural selection.

This course is aimed at PhD students and post-doctoral researchers who are applying, or will apply in the near future, high throughput sequencing technologies and the related bioinformatics tools in their research. Participants with limited UNIX/Linux and R/Bioconductor experience will be provided with basic understanding of the command-line operations and the foundations of the R programming language on the first day of the course.