Tutorial D
Analysis of small RNA‐Seq Data and the Identification of microRNA controlled Pathways
Tuesday October 13, 2015, full day (10:00 – 13:00 and 14:30 – 17:30)

This tutorial will focus on the design and analysis of a small-RNA-Seq experiment and especially on its differences compared to other NGS methodologies. Specific attention will be paid on every crucial aspect including study design, sample quality check (QC), sequencing instruments and methodologies, data generation/pre-processing and QC. Subsequently, we will examine available methods for genome alignment and/or microRNA expression estimation.
The second part of the tutorial will focus on state-of-the-art online tools for microRNA functional analyses.

Ioannis Vlachos is a Postdoc researcher at DIANA-Lab, Pasteur Institute of Athens / Department of Computer & Communication Engineering, University of Thessaly, Greece.
He has worked since 2005 as a Bioinformatics/Computational Biology researcher in projects co-funded by the EU and from 2007-2012 as a Lecturer at the Laboratory for Experimental Surgery and Surgical Research, Medical School of Athens. In 2011 he joined DIANA-Lab, while in 2014 he became also a member of the Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory, NCSR “Demokritos” in Athens.

His research focus is gene expression regulation and non-coding RNA biogenesis and function. He has implemented numerous pipelines and novel algorithms for the analysis and integration of Next Generation Sequencing data, including: RNA-Seq, small-RNA-Seq, GRO-Seq, 3P-Seq, and PolyA-Seq.
He is currently involved in projects researching non-coding RNA transcriptional control, processing and interactions. He has also worked in projects resulting in repositories and online tools that are freely available to the community, including: DIANA-miRPath, DIANA-TarBase, microTSS, and DIANA-Web Server.
He has contributed to more than 50 publications in peer-reviewed journals.