First Steps with UNIX in Life Sciences

Overview

With a constant evolution of technologies, life scientists (such as laboratory biologists) are faced with an increasing need for bioinformatics skills to deal with high-throughput data storage, retrieval and analysis.

Although several resources developed for such tasks have a web interface (most of the time, the first choice of biologists), many operations can be more efficiently handled with command-line programs and utilities.

Audience

This "First Steps with..." course is addressed to beginners wanting to become familiar with the UNIX environment and master the most common commands, which could be useful to run software dedicated to high-throughput data management.

Learning objectives

At the end of the course you should:

• be able to execute most basic UNIX commands
• be able to build complex and combined commands using various parameters
• be sufficiently skilled for further courses requiring basics of UNIX, like HPC or NGS courses

Prerequisites

Knowledge / competencies:

As it is a course for beginners, no background in UNIX or any programming language is required.

Technical:

A laptop with at least 10 Go free on hard disk and 4 Go of RAM. As we plan to do exercises from a virtual machine, we will provide further information.

Application

The registration fees for academics are 50 CHF. This includes course content material and coffee breaks. Participants from non-academic institutions should contact us before application.

Deadline for registration and free-of-charge cancellation is set to November 3. Cancellation after this date will not be reimbursed. Please note that participation to SIB courses is subject to this and other general conditions, available at https://www.sib.swiss/training/terms-and-conditions.

You will be informed by email of your registration confirmation. 

Location

University of Lausanne, Génopode building, classroom 2020 (Metro M1 line, Sorge station).

Additional information

The course will be taught by Diana Marek and Grégoire Rossier, with the assistance of Ivan Topolsky for the practicals.

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.