Type of course

PhD course.

This course is available as a singular course.

Admission requirements

PhD students and students at the Student Research Programme, or holders of a Norwegian master´s degree of five years or 3+2 years (or equivalent) may be admitted.

External applicants apply for the right to study by June 1st for courses that are taught in the autumn semester. Application is sent through SøknadsWeb. Please use the appliction code "9301 - Singular courses at the PhD level". If granted admission to the course students must register for class and exam in Studentweb by September 1st for autumn semester.

The course has a capacity of 12 students. If there are less than 8 applicants, the course will be cancelled.

If there are more applicants than available spaces in the course, students will be given priority from category 1 to 4:

1. PhD students, research fellows and students participating in the Student Research Programme at UiT The Arctic University of Norway.

2. Participants in the Associate Professor Programme.

3. PhD students and students at a Medical Student Research Programme at other universities.

4. People who have minimum a master's degree or equivalent, but have not been admitted to a PhD programme.

Recommended prerequisites: Basic course in statistics (bachelor's level).

Course content

Topic in advanced genomic analysis in a medical translation perspective.

The content will be in three parts:

• The various genomic analysis techniques that are applied are reviewed and their theoretical foundation layed out. General thermes: Introduction to the technology and methods of analysis. (Sequencing (mainly the Illumnia technology), microarray and qPCRarray analysis, bioinformatic analyses and statistics (by use of Bioconductor R statistical language: preprocessing and normalization, alignment, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Partial Least Square Regression (PLS), clustering analysis, annotation &, pathway analysis, Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA), including handling of various databases and software tools).
• Examples from medical research on issues derived from clinical medicine where genomic analyses is applied.
• 'Hands-on' data analyses and statistical analyses of data generated through sequencing and microarray/PCRarray are including in this topic.

Objectives of the course

Knowledge

The students should be able to:

• assess the importance of the human genome in a molecular biology perspective as well as in the medical perspective on clinical issues.
• chose methodology that is applied to genomic analyzes within medical research based on the method's theoretical foundation.

Skills

The students should acquire to:

• apply these methods in their own studies.
• discuss current errors and limitations.
• evaluate the results, as well as assess the need for methodological development, and to actively participate in such efforts.

General expertise

The students should be able to:

• understand scientific studies within the medical disciplines where genomic methods are applied.

Language of instruction and examination

Teaching methods