The
Institut
National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM) organizes two coupled
training workshops on genome-scale approaches to genetic and epigenetic
regulation. Participants can register to either workshop independently, or to
both workshops.
Target audience: researchers, physicians, post-docs, technicians, engineers and
students in the domains of life science or bioinformatics. All conferences will
be given in English.
Registration deadline: June 1st, 2011.
Detailed programs and
registration forms:
Training workshop 211: High-throughput approaches in
epigenomics
Organizers: Emmanuel Barillot (Institut Curie/INSERM/Mines ParisTech, Paris),
Christophe Lavelle (CNRS, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris).
Phase I (theory): October 10-12, 2011, Bordeaux
(France).
Phase II
(practical): 2011,
Paris, Montpellier, Nice/Marseille (France), and Darmstadt (Germany).
Aims. Through
its polymorphism, as evidenced by the heterogeneity of its physicochemical
properties, chromatin is the support of an information — so-called
"epigenetic" — which is superimposed to the genetic information —
carried by DNA — to determine cell fate. While genetic sequencing, more and
more efficient, provides data at a dizzying pace, the "epigenetic
sequencing" is in turn becoming a priority in an attempt to gather all
information necessary for the deciphering of cellular function. The challenge
of this new quest is obvious when we know that, contrary to genetic
information, epigenetic information varies from one cell to another (within the
same organism) and in regard with the cell cycle, making the epigenome
particularly difficult to establish. However, the first high-resolution
epigenetical maps begin to emerge, including information as diverse (and
complementary) as the position of nucleosomes, the presence of histone variants
and their modifications, the distribution of transcription factors and
remodeling factors, and location of DNA methylation. While these profiles
accumulate, the need is urgent to develop analytical tools that allow efficient
analysis of these data, in hopes of eventually cracking the epigenetic code.
The objective of this workshop is to present the most recent techniques (mainly
ChIP-seq) in this area, focusing on possible problems commonly encountered in
their implementation. Beyond the "wet" technical aspects, a
presentation of the most common bioinformatics tools for analysis (peak
finding, differential analysis, integrative analysis of profiles, databases,
...) will also be provided.
Training workshop 212: Bioinformatics approaches to
decipher genome regulation from high-throughput data
Organizers: Jacques van Helden (ULB, Belgium), Philipp Bucher (SIB/ISREC,
Switzerland).
Phase I (theory): October 12-14, 2011, Bordeaux
(France).
Phase II
(practical): December
12-16, 2011, Marseille (France).
Aims. Genome regulation
plays a crucial role in embryonic development, adaptation of cells, tissues and
organisms to their environment, and evolution. This regulation occurs at multiple
levels: transcription, RNA maturation (splicing, degradation), micro-RNA,
nucleosome occupancy, chromosome conformation. New high-throughput methods
offer unprecedented ways to characterize regulatory elements at a genome scale:
expression microarrays, ChIP-on-chip, ChIP-seq, RNA-seq, protein binding
arrays, etc. Sequencing platforms become available in many institutes, but
researchers generally feel some perplexity when they are first confronted to
the terabases of novel data. New software tools re being developed to answer
those new needs, but their utilization requires to understand the underlying
principles, master the parameters, and interpret the significance of the
result. The goal of this workshop is to provide researchers with a theoretical
and practical training enabling them to apprehend the whole flow of data
analysis, from data acquisition to biological interpretation of the results.