LIVE for Plants:
The Summer Experience
JUNE 5 - August 11, 2023

Bioinformatics is a field of science that utilizes computers and computer programs to make sense of biological data. A bioinformatician is the scientist (magician) who turns large and complex sets of data into meaning (pretty figures). More importantly, a bioinformatician must understand both the biological context behind an experiment and the computational details of the analysis. As biology fully moves into the "Big Data" era, bioinformatic skills are quickly becoming an essential part of scientific training for students desiring to continue their education after college.

 

The LIVE (lncRNA identification and validation exercise) for Plants program is designed to introduce students to basic bioinformatics through the computational identification of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) from genomic and transcriptomic data sets. Why lncRNAs? LncRNAs perform a number of functions in the cell, but one of the most common is that of transcriptional regulator - turning other genes on or off. Identifying lncRNAs is made much easier by careful analysis of large amounts of transcriptomic data - a perfect biological question solved by bioinformatics.

 

Students will start their foray into bioinformatics through a two-week lncRNA discovery module held at Centenary College and remotely led from the Boyce Thompson Institute. Students will get a introduction to lncRNAs: their important roles and how bioinformaticians go about identifying them. Then they will use cloud computing and bioinformatic resources to identify lncRNAs from public transcriptome data.

 

Two lucky Centenary students will then be invited to further their lncRNA discoveries at the Boyce Thompson Institute in Ithaca, NY for the summer of 2023. In this fully funded 10-week National Science Foundation sponsored program, selected students will receive intensive training at the bench and at the computer. Students will develop an biological question around plant lncRNAs that can be addressed through transcriptomic profiling. Students will then generate their own long-read Oxford Nanopore transcriptome data, analyze it, and validate their findings. In addition, students will be fully immersed in summer research activities on campus, including bioinformatic training camps put on by CyVerse.