Two VIDISCA courses: from pork blood soup to nodes and phosphates

In October and early November two HONOURs courses were executed at the AMC. The first course  “VIRUS DISCOVERY using VIDISCA Next Generation Sequencing” showed the steps of the fast-VIDISCA and the analysis pipeline attached to the method.

The students had to extract the interesting virus-sequence-reads among the haystack of virus and virus-like sequences that a clinical sample can contain. The final day the students made suggestions on follow up research on the novel viruses, in line with the HONOURs aim: to locate, identify, characterize, contain, and control infections that are caused by zoonotic agents. The second course: “Advanced viromics: VIDISCA libraries and VIDISCA sequence analysis” went into a different direction. The focus was on library preparation, how to improve adaptor ligation during VIDISCA and measuring the efficiencies of suggested improvements. A hard core course on all you ever wanted to know on DNA polymerization, ligation and phosphodiester bonds.