About the course

The main objective of the course is to introduce the participants to advanced bioinformatics and statistics methodologies and software tools for analyzing and managing microarray data.

The course is aimed at advanced PhD students and post-doctoral researchers who are applying microarray technologies and bioinformatics methods in their research, and who are already familiar with the basic microarray data analysis methods.
We expect that the participants will have already performed microarray based experiments, and will bring their own data for analysis during the practical sessions of the course.

Over the past few years microarrays have become an established technology in molecular biology used in an increasing number of laboratories. An increasing number of data analysis tools are becoming available to researchers of different levels of expertise, and several courses on microarray data analysis are given annually by EMBO and other organizations. Nevertheless, the data analysis are still a major bottleneck in the utilization of these data  the microarray users often find that the naïve analysis methods do not bring the desired results, and at the same time new increasingly sophisticated microarray platforms are introduced, and the new methods are needed to analyze their data. The course will be aimed at familiarizing the participants with such advanced methodologies and teaching to use the advanced tools.

The European Bioinformatics Institute is one of acknowledged leaders in microarray informatics and data analysis. The co-organizers of the course are internationally acknowledged leaders of the field. The two main motivation for proposing this course are the dissemination of our expertise and acquired knowledge, and filling in the gap in teaching advanced data analysis methods.

Target Audience

EMBO Courses are primarily open to applicants from member states of the EMBC. Applicants from outside the EMBC countries will only be given low priority. The student selection will be done by the co-organisers of the course in consultation with the EMBO. The student selection criteria will be

• relevance of their current work to the objectives of the course

• scientific excellence of the previous research

• quality of the applications

• geographical distribution

• recommendations from EMBO

Students at early stages of their career will be accepted if they can demonstrate the relevance of their work to the objectives of the course. Students who will have performed DNA-array experiments will be preferred. Ideally the students should have data from their own DNA-array experiments to analyse during the course. Applicants from industry will not be considered for funding from EMBO. Staff from the host institutions will not be taken as students, but will be allowed to participate in the lectures. The students from the UK will not be given any preference.

Deadline for applications: 18 April 2006.
Selected canditates will be inform by 26 April 2006.

All participants will be asked, in turn, to give a 10 minutes presentation on their work and data. The presentations will be made over dinner.
Please prepare your presentation in a PowerPoint format and bring it on a CD or USB stick.

Financial Support

The costs of participant accommodation and catering is paid by EMBO.
The travel costs have to be covered by the participants (financial support may be possible for participants from the Eastern European countries).