ABSTRACT COURSE ON ADVANCED SEQUENCING TECHNOLOGIES & BIOINFORMATICS ANALYSIS This Cold Spring Harbor annual short course will train a diverse cohort of biological and biomedical scientists in the latest sequencing technologies and the downstream bioinformatics analysis of the large quantities of sequence data generated by these technologies. The proposed Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory course on Advanced Sequencing Technologies & Bioinformatics Analysis is to be held November 2021-2025. A broad range of scientific questions are amenable to exploration through modern approaches in DNA/RNA sequence analysis, and we therefore anticipate applications from individuals working in areas across the biological and biomedical sciences, from evolution and development to plant and animal physiology to cancer and host response to infectious diseases. Students will be instructed in the detailed operation of several revolutionary sequencing platforms, including library construction procedures, general data processing, and in-depth data analysis. Common experimental approaches enabled by massively parallel sequencing technologies will be explored in detail, including de novo DNA sequencing and assembly of genomes, DNA re-sequencing of known cancer genes, bulk transcriptome profiling, single-cell transcriptome profiling, small variant discovery/interpretation and other approaches that are tailored to the student's research areas of interest. Expanding the bioinformatics component of the course, students will be introduced to Unix command-line, important file formats, alignment, data visualization, basic scripting in R, bash and other program languages, cluster job submission and bioinformatics pipeline development. Guest lecturers contribute to the course and are encouraged to highlight their own applications of these revolutionary technologies. This specialized training in a residential setting immediately impacts the progress of the trainees' research, and promotes collaboration and exchange of ideas between faculty and trainees, and thus represents a significant and valuable investment towards accelerating genome research. The advanced scope of the course will be twinned with an innovative educational design, including the broader dissemination of the course lectures and associated material and problem sets via tailored online learning tools. Significant outreach to and engagement of underserved research communities and individuals will be combined with dedicated mentoring and follow-up to help provide ongoing academic support to and retention of underserved individuals with specific research interests that intersect with the scope of the course.