Big Data in Biotechnology

This is an introductory course in large-scale data analysis. Many experimental procedures such as the various “-omics” techniques routinely employed within biotechnology produce vast amounts of data. Therefore, the amount of available data in many biotechnological disciplines is steadily increasing. While most biotechnological data is not necessarily of a size and complexity defined as big data, fundamental knowledge and skills of large-scale computing systems and analysis methods is required to make use of this wealth of information. The purpose of this course is to introduce the theory and practice of large-scale data analysis to students, which will allow them to perform and assess different types of ”-omics”-scale data procedures. Tentative list of data types to be covered in the course: Transcriptomic data (RNAseq), Metabolomic data (LC-MS), and Biological image data.

This course covers the fundamental challenges with analysis of large amounts of data, i.e. how to handle large data files and how to overcome computational/storage limitations. The course provides knowledge and skills to perform data wrangling and normalization. The students will obtain working knowledge of basic data handling, data analysis, and data visualization. Through in-depth focus on the handling and analysis of a relevant set of different data-types using programming-based analysis techniques, this course will address statistical and computational challenges of large-scale data analysis.

Basic knowledge of the experimental methods used to generate the data types used in the course will also be briefly covered, because an understanding of the experimental methods used to generate data is often needed to assess bias and confounding factors in data.