Bioinformatics Projects Pathway for Students: New insights from public data!

Posted on: 3 March 2025 purlPURL: https://gxy.io/GTN:N00107

With a huge thanks to ELIXIR-UK’s DaSH Fellowship funding, we are delighted to present our new Learning Pathway, “Bioinformatics Projects: Using deconvolution to get new insights from old bulk RNA-seq”.

As science moves forward - and indeed, large language models and AI put the final nails in the coffin of education evaluation through recall - project-based learning takes centre stage. Such work develops independent thinking, resilience, initiative, and accountability in students - all key attributes for employability and ultimately advancing science. However, project-based learning is difficult to scale across a student body. Finding project ideas for and working up project ideas with students takes significantly more time than traditional multiple-choice question tests.

So what’s the solution?

Here, we provide a learning pathway of tutorials that can guide students from learning Galaxy to building research questions, to analysing results. From finding datasets and converting to usable formats, to benchmarking methods and interpreting quality indicators, and finally to looking through old data to find new results, this Learning Pathway delivers a novel, cutting-edge, and scalable means for students to learn bioinformatics through individual projects.

🎉A big thank you to to the passionate team that put this together, and to ELIXIR-UK for partially funding this effort!🎉

Funding

These organisations or grants provided funding support for the development of this resource

DASH UK

This Fellowship was funded through the ELIXIR-UK DaSH project as part of the UKRI Innovation Scholars: Data Science Training in Health and Bioscience call (DaSH). (MR/V038966/1). The project aims to embed Research Data Management (RDM) know-how into UK universities and institutes by producing and delivering training in FAIR data stewardship using ELIXIR-UK knowledge and resources.