Description:

This workshop provides a brief overview on the most popular features of two genome browsers: the UCSC Genome Browser and the Ensembl Genome Browser. Both browsers allow the user to retrieve comprehensive information on a gene or genomic sequence in context of the genome, with multiple customizable tracks to display curated data from numerous external sources for features such as polymorphisms, transcript variants and histone modifications. The UCSC Genome Browser was created by the Genome Bioinformatics Group of the University of California at Santa Cruz. Ensembl is a joint project between EMBL-EBI and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. This workshop will cover how to locate these browsers, manage tracks and annotations, how to get sequence data from the browser view, and the avenues to download data from each site – we will compare and contrast how each browser displays data, so the user can decide which is best for their purposes.

Prerequisites: There are no formal prerequisites for this workshop, but we recommend that attendees have an active account on Quest and are familiar with the basics of submitting jobs.

The Foundations in Genomics Analyses series will be taught in person on the Chicago campus and virtually during the fall 2024 quarter and will cover topics and skills foundational to conducting genomics-related research. This series is a collaboration between Northwestern IT's Research Computing and Data Services and the Galter Library and will be taught by Haley Carter and Pamela Shaw. Attendees are welcome to attend just one or as many workshops in the series they are interested in. However, there may be some references to previous weeks' material in any given workshop.