General
Course responsibles: Allan Stensballe (as@hst.aau.dk) & Xiangdong Fang (fangxd@big.ac.cn)
The course is dived into a range of topics that extends the curriculum from the Fall semester as introduces a range of central techniques in Life Sciences.
Due to the flu and reorganization each Lecture will follow the planned dates but all will be scheduled electronically.
Aim
Biosciences in the post genome era are a technology driven field.
Progress depends on investigating molecular changes with large-scale
technologies. This course aims to build basic understanding of the technologies
and methods used to characterize and detect variations in genome,
transcriptome, proteome, and metabolites of, humans, animals, plants and
microorganisms, and to provide students with knowledge sufficient for
evaluating the specific strength, weakness and possibility of individual basic
methods for characterizing biological systems at molecular levels.
The course will provide the students with the skills to understand explain and select the relevant basic methods for characterizing biological systems by large-scale molecular mapping methods. The students will develop the skills to evaluate the strengths and shortcomings of specific technological approaches currently available for describing genome, proteome, transcriptome and metabolome changes in biological systems. The competences achieved are appropriate for preparing the students to design their own experimental approaches for final master projects.
Learning objectives
The students will be able to:
- Evaluate strengths and limitations of various Omics techniques and supporting methods
- Explain the overall theoretical principles behind several statistical methods
- Account for the preconditions, assumptions and limitations in the individual steps of the statistical analysis
- Independently perform a basic analysis of the various Omics data using several open-source and commercially available programs, including CLC Genomic workbench, MaxQuant & Perseus adn Skyline.
Content and perspective
- Advanced Mass spectrometry technology (Instrumentation, Electrospray ionization, MALDI-TOF, ion optics, mass analyzers and operation)
- Advanced Protein and metabolite quantification (LC-MS/MS, SRM and MRM methods)
- Protein and genearray technology applied in omics
- Advanced Imaging in omics (EM, MALDI Imaging)
- Advanced Next generation DNA sequencing
- RNAseq based transcriptomics
Intended learning outcome
By the end of the course, the student is expected to have obtained the skills to:
1. Evaluate strengths and limitations of individual central technologies for structural and quantitative analyses of DNA, mRNA, proteins and metabolites from biological samples
2. Evaluate the quality of data from proteome, genome, transcriptome and metabolome analyses as presented in original scientific literature
3. Evaluate and reflect on the shortcomings of the specific methods and technologies chosen to describe specific biological systems in original research articles
4. Suggest alternative approaches to those presented in original scientific literature
5. be able to motivate the choice of experimental methods and approaches for describing and investigating specific biological problems