Over the past decade, human genomics research has been driven by the generation of enormous quantities of data. There has been a concerted effort by the scientific community to make much of this data publicly available for unrestricted research use. A wide range of databases and web services have been developed to make this data more readily accessible. In this workshop, we will introduce some of the most popular publicly available databases and resources used by the genomics research community. The objective of this workshop is to enable attendees to become familiar with how these resources can be accessed and how they can potentially be used for research. The first part of the workshop will be focused on general human genomics data resources such as UCSC genome browser, gnomAD, GTEx and ENCODE. The second part of the workshop will be specifically focused on cancer genomics data resources including the TCGA, Genomics Data Commons and cbioPortal.
Keywords: Genomics; Cancer; Databasese; Bioinformatics
Requirements: Participants will gain most benefit from this workshop if they have access to a laptop with a Wifi connection. There will be minimal assumed knowledge
Relevance: This workshop will be relevant to those who are interested in doing genomics research, and who want to know how to access the many publicly – available datasets and databases online. The second part of this workshop will be specifically relevant to those working in cancer research
School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Hong Kong
Dr Jason Wong is an Associate Professor at the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. He received his B.Sc (Hons I), specialising in Bioinformatics from the University of Sydney. He completed a D.Phil in Bioanalytical Chemistry at the University of Oxford, UK. He has published over 90 original peer-reviewed journal articles with half as first or senior author in journals including Nature, Cell Reports, Genome Biology and Nucleic Acids Research. He currently leads a research program in Computational Cancer Genomics and his research is focused on the study of cancer mutational processes and their effects on gene regulation and function.
Children’s Medical Research Institute, The University of Sydney
Dr Rebecca Poulos is an NHMRC Early Career Fellow at the Children’s Medical Research Institute. She completed her PhD in the field of cancer genomics in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of New South Wales. She has first-author publications in prestigious journals including Nature and Cell Reports, and has collaborated on research published in Cancer Cell and Nature Communications, among others. Dr Poulos is currently working in cancer proteogenomics, where she is using big data from cancer proteomes and genomes to find signatures that predict drug response and patient survival. She has experience analysing large high-throughput cancer datasets and utilising bioinformatics databases for genomics, epigenomics and proteomics.