ACEMFS CApIC-ACE-FUT Minna Bioinformatics Workshop

Workshop Title: Introduction to Bioinformatics

The Covenant Applied Informatics and Communication Africa Centre for Ecellence (CApIC-ACE) was established based on the urgent need to build a critical mass of indigenous African scientists with the necessary bioinformatics, molecular biology, and information & communications engineering knowledge and skills to drive and sustain impactful researches in the areas of malaria, prostate and breast cancer as well as cloud & high performance computing as related to personalized medicine, in collaboration with academic, clinical and industrial institutions in Nigeria, West Africa, Africa, Germany, France, US and UK.

CApIC-ACE in conjuction with ACEMFS is hosting this 3 days hands-on Bioinformatics training in FUT Minna from Wednesday 27th August, 2025 to Friday 29th August, 2025. This training is focused on Bioinformatics for mycology and mycotoxicology research.The role of CApIC-ACE in this workshop is to provide support, guidance, and networking for participants.

The training objectives are as follows:

Understand bioinformatics concepts and databases
Perform sequence quality control and alignment
Conduct differential gene expression analysis
Visualize genomic and structural data
Apply computational tools to mycotoxin research

Trainer

Teaching Assistants

Pre- Workshop Instruction

All Participants are required to fill this form

Workshop Overview

Workshop Timetable

Day 1 Plan: Genomics & Sequence Analysis

Time	Session	File link	Details
9:00 AM - 9:30 AM	Welcome & Overview	----	Workshop objectives, introduction to bioinformatics, relevance to mycotoxin research
9:30 AM - 10:30 AM	Introduction to Biological Databases	Introduction PDF file	NCBI, ENA, UniProt, PDB, Ensembl, KEGG - how to search, download, and interpret
10:30 AM - 11:00 AM	Break	Break	Break
11:00 AM - 12:30 AM	Sequence Retrieval & Quality Control (Galaxy)	Sequential Retrieval & Quality Control using Galaxy PDF file	Tool: FastQC; Dataset: Mycotoxin-related fungal genome from ENA
12:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Lunch	Lunch	Lunch
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM	Primer Design for Gene Targeting	Primer Design PDF file	Tool: Primer3 (via Galaxy or Primer-BLAST)
3:00 PM - 4:30 PM	Variant Calling & Functional Annotation	Variant Calling PDF file	Tool: Galaxy, SnpEff / SnpSift

Day 2 Plan: Phylogeny, Biostatistics & Transcriptomics

Time	Session	File link	Details
9:00 AM - 9:30 AM	Recap of Day 1 Activities	----	----
9:30 AM - 10:30 AM	Phylogenetics	Phylogenetics Guide PDF file	Tool: Clustal Omega, MEGA
10:30 AM - 11:00 AM	Break	Break	Break
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM	Biostatistics in R for Omics Data	----	Tool: RStudio (cloud or local); Task: Volcano plots, boxplots, PCA
12:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Lunch
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM	Transcriptomic Data Analysis: RNA-Seq	----	Tools: Galaxy RNA-Seq workflow - HISAT2, featureCounts
3:00 PM - 4:30 PM	Differential Expression Analysis in Galaxy	----	Tool: DESeq2; Task: Fold change and volcano plots using example dataset

Day 3 Plan: Structural Bioinformatics

Time	Session	File link	Details
9:00 AM - 9:30 AM	Recap of day 1 and day 2 activities	----	----
9:30 AM - 10:30 AM	Introduction to Protein Structure & Databases	Introduction to Protein Structure & Databases PDF file	Tools: RCSB PDB, UniProt, AlphaFold; Visualizers: PyMOL or ChimeraX
10:30 AM - 12:00 PM	Ligand Preparation and Protein-Ligand Binding	Ligand Preparation and Protein-Ligand Binding PDF file	Tools: AutoDock Vina, Chimera; Dataset: Mycotoxin + fungal enzyme PDB structure
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Lunch	Lunch	Lunch
1:00 PM - 2:50 PM	Mini - Project Implementation	Mini - Project Implementation	Mini - Project Implementation
2:50 PM - 3:30 PM	Presentation of Mini-Projects	Presentation of Mini-Projects	Presentation of Mini-Projects
3:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Wrap-up: Tools Integration & Project Ideas	----	Group discussion: Apply tools to participants' own datasets or design mini-projects
4:00 PM - 4:30 PM	Certificates & Feedback	----	Evaluation, group photo