NCBI Tools (for PhD students and postdocs)

NCBI Taxonomy is a good starting point to keep a tab on species of your interest. We will look at the structure, navigation and links to other NCBI databases, zoom in on your focal species but also find potential related species of interest. This will cover how NCBI taxonomy can assist with your research work.We will follow the links from taxonomy to NCBI SRA (Sequence Read Archive). SRA, being a metadata collection, will be broken up into components and we will look at the relations between them. The Advanced Search feature of SRA will be covered to find out what others have done with data similar to yours – this will help you decide how to process and generate NGS data relevant to your research project.We will end the afternoon with a few practical examples and exploratory browsing to show you how these databases can help you to conceptualise new hypotheses. The course does not need bioinformatics or command line experience but can also be beneficial to people having those.