Bioinformatics for horticultural sciences

The introduction of bioinformatics and computational biology into the area of plant biology is drastically accelerating scientific research in life science. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies and other potent computational tools, which allow sequencing of whole genomes and transcriptomes, have led to the extensive studies of plants towards stress response, production physiology, and biodiversity on a molecular basis. Therefore, the utilization of bioinformatic tools is important to study and analyze the vast amount of data generated. The scope of this course is both to provide an overview of the tools available and to enable the student to perform real-case data analyses with a practical approach.

At the end of the course, the student will have an overview of the main plant bioinformatic techniques and tools. Moreover, he/she will be able to address the analysis and information mining of complex data sets. A basic knowledge of a programming and data analysis language (R and Bioconductor) is also expected.