Computational Phyloinformatics. Portugal

Computational Phyloinformatics July 9-19 2009

An International Collaboration between Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência and NESCent

This year, Computational Phyloinformatics will be traveling to the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, near Lisbon, Portugal. The IGC is one of Portugal's top research institutes that focuses on the genetic basis of development and evolution of complex systems. Please consult the main IGC GTPB course page here.

The course will provide a hands-on instruction in phyloinformatics using Perl (BioPerl and Bio::Phylo) and SQL (Postgres and BioSQL).

Phylogenetics is key to studying evolution, systematics, comparative genomics, and bioinformatics — phylogenies are now ubiquitous in the biological literature. However, with the growth in computational power and DNA sequencing, and with ever more complex substitution models and analytical methods, it is less and less practical to run simple, one-shot analyses on a personal computer with an off-the-shelf program. As a result, we increasingly rely on custom-scripted analyses or custom-designed computational pipelines, and often on large compute machines or clusters. While books and courses on phylogenetics are common, it is harder to find information on how to script large-scale and complex analyses, or how to write your own scripts and programs.

This course aims to address this gap by introducing these skills in a practical, hands-on setting at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, near the mouth of the Tagus river in Oeiras, Portugal. This year's course will focus on hands-on training in Perl and SQL and will be structured to accommodate students with less prior programming experience.