BIOS201 is offered by the School of Life Sciences at SUSTech, Shenzhen. This is in collaboration with BGI-Shenzhen. In this course, you will perform targeted sequencing of 214 locations of your own genome and find out if there are any differences between your DNA and the reference genome. More importantly, you will find out how to assess if those differences can affect certain aspects of yourself. Basically, you will learn the following topics:

  • Sequencing

    • What is PCR and how it works
    • What is sequencing by synthesis (SBS) and how it works
    • What is Next Generation sequencing
    • How BGI DNA nanoball sequencing (DNBSEQ) works

  • Library preparation

    • What is a sequencing library
    • Genomic DNA extraction from your saliva
    • Making library to sequence on the MGISEQ-200 platform

  • Genomic variants

    • What are genomic variants
    • Different types of genomic variants
    • Why do we care about the variants
    • The relationship between the variants and phenotypes
    • Genome-wide association study
    • The 1000 Genomes Project and other projects with similar purposes

  • Data analysis

    • Unix boot camp
    • Common bioinformatics file formats
    • Quality assessment of the sequencing reads
    • Read aligment to the reference genome
    • Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) identification
    • Investigation of the outcome of SNPs
    • Principle component analysis of genotypes