As part of our promises, we played host to 26 Scientists from 14 African countries on our ILRI Addis-Ababa campus for a week-long bioinformatics workshop from September 30 to October 4, 2019. The workshop themed “Genetic data analysis; Tools, Methods and Trends”, and was jointly organized by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) under the CRP Livestock genetics flagship program. Every participant was provided with some form of scholarship. Participants from outside Ethiopia, especially nominated Scientists from all our current 13 African partner institutions were offered full scholarships to cover their air tickets, accommodation and meals. The workshop facilitators included Professor Erik Bongcam Rudloff (SLU), Dr Anna Maria Johansson (SLU), Dr Getinet Mekuriaw Tarekegn (SLU), Dr Abdulfatai Tijjani (ILRI) and Dr Setegn Worku (ILRI). Distinguished Professor Olivier Hanotte played host to the workshop participants

The course content includes the following.

  • Introduction to Unix, Introduction to R
  • Introduction to NGS technologies
  • Basic NGS data analysis; file formats, quality control, read mapping, variant calling and variant annotation
  • Genetic diversity and population structure analyses, including PCA, Admixture and phylogenetic relationship
  • Selective sweep analysis and identification of candidate selected genes
  • Application of genomics technology in livestock breeding e.g. Genomic selection
Participants at Bio-informatics training workshop