Educators:
Stefan Albaum, Jan-Simon Baasner, Sebastian Jünemann, Nils Kleinbölting, Alexander Sczyrba, Alex Walender (BiGi), Daniel Wibberg (CAU), David Brandt, Christian Rückert, Jörn Kalinowski (CeBiTec)

Date:
30 November – 4 December 2020

Location:
Online

Content:
Aim of this workshop is to familiarize the participants with the Nanopore sequencing technology, its applications, the "Best Practice" bioinformatics workflows and the analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genomes. The Nanopore technology has greatly facilitated the assembly of prokaryotic, viral and eukaryotic genomes. Therefore, the workshop is focused on the establishment of finalized genome sequences, ranging from basecalling, quality assessment over assembly to sequence polishing and finally assembly evaluation. A focus in this years workshop is on the analysis of Nanopore sequenced SARS-CoV-2 genomes and a suitable workflow for resequencing based on the ARTIC bioinformatics protocol.
The course will start with a one day webinar on best practices for the lab work on sequencing SARS-CoV2 and a “guided tour” showing the necessary bioinformatics steps. This part of the workshop is open to a large number of applicants. The following 4 days will be a mixture of talks and practical sessions in the de.NBI cloud introducing, in more detail, the Nanopore sequencing technology and bioinformatics processing tools, as, for instance, base calling, assembly and polishing.This part of the workshop is, however, limited to a smaller number of applicants.

Learning goals:
This workshop aims to teach basic skills and best practices to researchers working with Nanopore data, e.g. SARS-CoV-2. The full course will include all necessary steps from raw sequencing data to finalized genomes (1) with a de novo assembly and (2) with re-sequencing and mapping to a reference.

Prerequisites:
This workshop is intended for PhD students and postdocs with molecular biology background in genomics or SARS-CoV2 background. Good understanding of command line tools is a plus, but not required.

Tools:
minimap2, canu, pilon, guppy, porechop, medaka, poretools, nextstrain, quast, ARTIC pipeline

Keywords:
Nanopore sequencing, genome assembly, genomics, SARS-CoV2,