"With the financial help from the Graduate Research Academy RNA Biology, I was able to attend to an EMBO Practical Course on the analysis of Next Generation Sequencing Data at the EMBL-EBI campus in Hinxton (United Kingdom) in October this year. This course is aimed at advanced PhD students and post-doctoral researchers who are applying or planning to apply high throughput sequencing technologies and bioinformatics methods in their research. The aim of this course is to familiarise the participants with advanced data analysis methodologies and provide hands-on training on the latest analytical approaches. The course mainly uses R packages to analyze exemplary RNA-Seq and ChIP-seq data and the lecturers that introduced the individual topics and helped in the practical part had often written the applied packages themselves and were thus the best ones to ask.
All participants were housed at the Wellcome Trust Conference Centre next to the EMBL-EBI training centre which includes buildings from the 17^th century. Since all meals and coffee breaks were taken together by both participants and lecturers, the interaction factor was high and I, personally, took home very helpful comments and ideas on how to handle my NGS data.
As a social highlight of the course, the whole group visited Cambridge and had dinner at one of the Colleges situated in Cambridge.
Back home, I’ll now work on my individual bioinformatic pipeline to analyze my RNA-seq and ChIP-seq data."

A report from Julia Wimmer, PhD student of the RIGeL Section CBB

Photo 1: Seminar room, Photo 2: Campus EMBL-EBI