Skip to content

Home

Life scientists often use commercial software such as Prism for data analysis. These tools are useful for initial and basic analysis, but do not allow for more advanced or flexible analyses, nor for the analysis of omics data, neither for the establishment of pipelines and reports. On the other hand, R is statistical software that allows for very flexible analysis, customizable pipeline creation and generation of reports, and is open-source!

The “Introduction to R for Life Sciences” training is designed for beginners and will provide hands-on practical sessions with R and RStudio. Participants will receive example data and R commands to learn how to navigate the R environment, import and explore data, and generate graphs and reports. The example data will reflect the types generated through high-throughput sequencing.

This course is proposed by the Translational Data Science Facility of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics in Lausanne, and taught by João Lourenço and Tania Wyss.

Learning outcomes

R is vast and cannot be learned in one day. The scope of this course is to:

  • Give you a basic understanding of concepts behind R.
  • Allow you to import and manipulate data in R.
  • Show you how to create your first plots.

This course is only the first step in your R journey!

Asking questions

During lectures, you are encouraged to ask questions, any question! There are no bad questions!