We will be running a Certificate course in Bioinformatics in August 2020. Details attached. It is geared at post graduates and post docs. For those outside of University College Dublin or for all post docs, successful completion of the course will lead to the award of a "Professional Certificate in Bioinformatics"

Hi Hatty Douthwaite,

I was exactly in your shoes two years ago when I tried to cut cost by doing bioinformatic analysis on my own (without any prior knowledge in programming language and bioinformatics). Basically, to analyse RNA-seq data from raw reads, you will need basic knowledge about

• Linux
• R language
• Workflow of RNA seq analysis (QC > Mapping > Gene count > Differential gene expression > Pathway Analysis)

In terms of hardware, computers with higher processing power will definitely speed up the analysis. For QC, genome mapping and gene count, I ran on Linux OS. You will also need a lot of storage space. Having access to supercomputing centre will also help a bit.

Next, to actually run the analysis, I will highly recommend you to get someone who have done RNA-seq analysis to guide you. Doing so will tremendously reduce time taken to complete the analysis. If you want to start from scratch, the following resources may help:

If you learn everything on your own from scratch, I think there are two very steep learning curves, the first one is when you learn Linux, the second one is when you use R. If you have some sort of background in both, then you may work out just fine.

All the best!

Thanks everyone so much for your answers - some reading to be done!!

Better to analyze RNAseq data yourself, take only sequencing and basic QC from the facility. You can start with very simple tools like CLC workbench then once you get familiar with RNAseq then you can use many open source tools.

We used Novogene for sequencing and bioinformatics analysis.I highly recommend.

https://en.novogene.com/