Next Generation Sequencing Data Analysis: A Remote Course from NLM

The course Next Generation Sequencing Data Analysis was taught remotely from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to the University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus , the University of Maryland and the University of North Carolina on March 5, 2013. The course focused on issues of sequence quality, mapping, variant analysis and biological context, and included hands-on operation of Galaxy, an open, web-based platform for data intensive biomedical research (http://usegalaxy.org).

Medha Bhagwat, PhD, Bioinformatics Support Program Coordinator, National Institutes of Health Library taught the course simultaneously to sixty-six attendees located at the three sites. She used a set of technologies previously integrated by staff from NLM and from the Center for Information Technologies and Telecommunications (CentIT2) at the MSC to provide remotely the same capabilities and interactivity available on-site at computer labs (*). Twenty faculty and graduate students from the UPR Medical Sciences Campus, UPR Río Piedras Campus, Metropolitan University and Universidad del Este attended the session, which was held at the Title V computer cluster of the MSC. The course was very well received by participants at the three sites.

Local coordination at each site was provided by Alexa Mayo, AHIP, Associate Director for Services, Health Sciences and Human Services Library, University of Maryland; Barrie Hayes, MSLS, Bioinformatics Librarian at the Health Sciences Library and Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science, and by Carmen L. Cadilla, PhD, and José G. Conde, MD, MPH, both Professors at the UPR School of Medicine. Craig Locatis, PhD, Educational Research Specialist, Office of High-Performance Computing and Telecommunications, NLM, provided overall technical coordination with assistance from Kai Zhang and Wei-Li Liu, also from NLM. Myrna Agostini and Alex Lora, from CentIT2, provided technical support at the MSC. This activity was sponsored in Puerto Rico by the MSC RCMI Program (CentIT2 and Center for Genomics in Health Disparities and Rare Diseases), and co-sponsored by the INBRE Program of the UPR Río Piedras Campus.

This training used cloud services provided by an “AWS in Education” grant to the Galaxy Project. The Galaxy team is a part of BX at Penn State, and the Biology and Mathematics and Computer Science departments at Emory University. The Galaxy Project is supported in part by NSF, NHGRI, The Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, The Institute for CyberScience at Penn State, and Emory University.

* Locatis C, Vega A, Bhagwat M, Liu W, and Conde J. A virtual computer lab for distance biomedical technology education. BMC Medical Education. 1-8; March 2008.
Available at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6920/8/12