You may attend all three of the classes in this series, or any combination. Classes are free, but you must sign up.

The Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) Database is a public repository that archives and distributes high throughput gene expression data submitted by the scientific community. This class will introduce you to some of the main aspects of the database including how this information is organized and identified as well as the basic field descriptions associated with different types of data. We will initially focus on the GEO Profiles database and then look into the GEO DataSets database, which gives the user the opportunity to analyze associated experiments.

One of the more difficult aspects of the GEO DataSets database is the ability to cluster the data in user-defined ways. The goal of clustering is simply to subdivide a set of items in such a way that similar items fall into the same clusters. It is often one of the first steps in gene expression analysis. In this class we will look at how clustering algorithms work, which ones we should use, and what we can expect from them. We will integrate what we learn with the options available for GEO DataSets.

This class will focus on practical search and analysis techniques performed through the browser client associated with the GEO database. We will also take a brief look at accessing the information programmatically and integrating large datasets into our own archive for analysis through FTP.