Training Infrastructure Feedback from the MSc Program „Translational Medical Research“ (TMR), Medical Faculty of Mannheim, University of Heidelberg; WS 2024/25
From sequencing to R scripting—TIaaS helped us turn RNA-Seq into a hands-on learning success for future medical researchers.
Participants: 20 students
Further developed from our first Bioinformatic introduction course using Galaxy, the „Translational Medical Research“ TMR program now runs it as an officially integrated course in the curriculum. The course highly benefits from the provided TIaaS resource and from the instructor dashboard to look up the current queues to which students submit tasks.
Six sessions of 3 hours each (and self-study time around them) were filled with getting to know Galaxy, tools to process sequencing data and background information on common file formats and common issues in bioinformatics. As a novelty this year, we enriched the course by adding a session with R programming and theory and examples regarding Experimental Design.
We made use of the basic Galaxy tutorials „Galaxy 101 for everyone“, “A short introduction to Galaxy” and “Using dataset collections” for preparation, and delved deeper with the concise Galaxy tutorials „Quality Control“ and „Mapping”. After the initial steps time was focused on re-processing self-selected individual published RNA-seq datasets. Major life lessons came from this exercise which opened our eyes to issues regarding data input, data output, data access, using appropriate annotation files, and different final results depending on the pipelines used. The course and tools were highly praised by the students who now are equipped to understand, perform and discuss RNA-sequencing results.
Thanks a lot to the whole Galaxy team for providing the TIaaS, the self-study-suitable tutorials with great explanations, and the well maintained tools to process data. This will definitely not be our last TMR Galaxy course!