Bioinformatics tools for covid research

The covid-19 pandemic is of utmost concern. In almost a year and a half since the virus broke out in Wuhan, China, over 100,000 articles related to covid19 have been published in scientific journals because of the pandemic. In this course you can learn about practical bioinformatics tools which you can use in your own covid19 research.

These include getting data from covid19 databases, live covid19 tracking software and sequence analysis tools such as whole genome assembly and variant calling. NGS tools are also discussed for covid research. Databases include resources on the National Center for Biotechnology Information Website and the GISAID database.

Tools include Nextstrain and Nextclade as well as Exatype. This course is tailored towards students and researchers of all levels who are interested in studying coronavirus to help eradicate it. The tools shown during the course are fairly easy to use and do not presuppose too much prior knowledge of Windows or Linux.

We will also cover primer design, because PCR (poly chain reaction) is a tool that is use in covid19 diagnosis. For this, we will learn how to use a tool called primer3 in Windows. This itself is a generally useful tool used in many other areas of research.