With the increase in the volume of data across the whole spectrum of biology, more opportunities, as well as challenges, have been created to identify novel perspectives and answer questions in life sciences. This may also include public domain data, which can provide added value to data derived through the researcher’s own work and inform experimental design. 

This introductory course will highlight the challenges that researchers face in integrating multi-omics data sets using biological examples. The course will focus on the use of public data resources and open access tools for enabling integrated working, with an emphasis on data visualisation. This course will not include systems biology modelling or machine learning.

A major element of this course is a group project, where participants will be placed in small groups to work together on a challenge set by trainers from EMBL-EBI data resource and research teams. This allows participants to explore the bioinformatics tools and resources introduced in the course and to apply these to a set problem, providing hands-on experience of relevance to their own research. The group work will culminate in a presentation session involving all participants on the final day of the course, allowing wider discussion on the benefits and challenges of integrating data.