Cost reduction in sequencing technologies is resulting in a growing number of laboratories getting involved in genome sequencing projects where a large amount of sequencing data is generated. After assembly, a large amount of unique sequences are obtained which need to be further characterized with putative functions. Good and sufficient functional annotations are decisive for follow up analyses such as gene expression, strain variations, tissue functional profiling, etc.

The course will teach on the principals and practical aspects of automated functional annotation of (novel) sequence data.
Participants will learn how to :

• Create and run standard or costumed pipelines for generating functional labels for sequence data.
• Design annotation strategies and generate different annotation types
• Create a local database installation for annotation speed up
• Evaluate and report the results of the functional annotation pipeline
• Perform data-mining and knowledge discovery using functional annotation and experimental data
• Study similarities and differences between annotation datasets
• Generate and modify knowledge-containing functional annotation graphs

The course will be based on the use of Blast2GO application and will mainly comprise exercises and practical cases. Participants might bring their own data.

Who should attend? Experimentalists and bioinformaticians working on EST, Next Generation Sequencing and microarray design projects, specially (but not exclusively) of non-model species.