Members of the Philippine Genome Center DNA Sequencing Core Facility and Core Facility for Bioinformatics participated in the 2012 Autumn Course on Genomics and Bioinformatics held at the National Cheng Kung University in Tainan, Taiwan. Gabriel Villamil of the PGC-DSCF and Lovette Cunanan and Joeriggo Reyes of the PGC-CFB attended the 5-day course along with students and researchers from Taiwan, Japan, India, and Vietnam.
The course was organized by the National Cheng Kung University Department of Life Sciences, Fujitsu, and the Society of Genetics, Genomics, and Computational Biology. Speakers from the NCKU Institute of Molecular Medicine, the National Institute of Genetics in Japan, and the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics in India gave lectures on cancer gene mining, statistical methods for variant calling from massively-parallel DNA sequencing data, and tools for next generation sequencing data analaysis. Dr. Yasumasa Shigemoto, system engineer at Fujitsu Japan, facilitated a hands-on workshop on genome assembly and annotation using NGS data.
The course, which began on December 3, concluded on December 7 with a bioinformatics analysis contest where participants applied what they learned from the workshop in assembling and annotating bacterial genomes from actual NGS data. Gabriel Villamil from DSCF was awarded 2nd place in the international competition and took home 12,000 NTD (less taxes) from Fujitsu.
