Overview

Sex and gender have been historically ignored as explanatory variables in transcriptomics studies, in particular because of the fear that additional study variables might escalate experimental costs and complicate data analysis. However recent policies from funding agencies and scientific journals require attention to sex and gender in research projects. More and more biologists now incorporate biological sex as an experimental variable, but how to do so appropriately can still be challenging.

In this one-day course we aim at guiding biologists and bioinformaticians through the steps of designing robust experiments, with a focus on high-throughput transcriptomics experiments, and rigorously analysing them to draw statistically valid conclusions from such costly experiments.

Audience

This course is addressed to life scientists and computational biologists working in basic or biomedical research, on human or animals, involved in planning/experimental design and/or performing downstream analysis. Pure data analysts are welcome as they can have a role to play from the beginning of research projects!

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course, the participants are expected to:
- Engage in informed discussions with colleagues about critical issues and challenges related to sex-based considerations in biological data collection.
- Propose suitable study design options and recognize potential biases that may arise in the collection and interpretation of biological data.
- Apply rigorous analytical methods for the analysis of transcriptomic and other large-scale datasets accounting for the biological sex variable.
- Interpret and report findings accurately.
- Translate knowledge acquired during the course to other projects including confounding variables, in particular relevant to diversity and inclusion (e.g., age, ethnicity...).

Prerequisites

Knowledge / competencies

Participants should already have a basic knowledge of the analysis of gene expression data, for example as taught in the SIB course Introduction to bulk RNA-Seq: From Quality Control to Pathway Analysis. A basic knowledge of the R statistical software is required. Test your R skills with the quiz here, before registering.

Technical

You are required to bring your own laptop with a wifi connection. An online R and RStudio environment will be provided, but attendees who wish to run the practicals on their own laptop should install R and RStudio before the start of the course.

Application

The registration fees for academics are 100 CHF and 500 CHF for for-profit companies.

You will be informed by email of your registration confirmation. Upon reception of the confirmation email, participants will be asked to confirm attendance by paying the fees within 5 days.

Applications close on 20/10/2025. Deadline for free-of-charge cancellation is set to 13/10/2025. Cancellation after this date will not be reimbursed. Please note that participation in SIB courses is subject to our general conditions.

Venue and Time

This course will take place at the University of Bern.

The course will start at 9:15 and end around 17:15. Precise information will be provided to the participants in due time.

Additional information

Coordination: Grégoire Rossier, SIB Training Group.

We will recommend 0.25 ECTS credits for this course (given a passed exam at the end of the course).

You are welcome to register to the SIB courses mailing list to be informed of all future courses and workshops, as well as all important deadlines using the form here.

Please note that participation in SIB courses is subject to our general conditions.

SIB abides by the ELIXIR Code of Conduct. Participants of SIB courses are also required to abide by the same code.

For more information, please contact training@sib.swiss.