GALORE, or Genomics and Long Reads Education, is an open teaching resource I developed in the Chakraborty Lab to help students learn genomics through hands-on analysis of real biological data. The modules guide learners through core bioinformatics skills, including command-line tools, genomic file formats, long-read genome assembly, whole-genome alignment, and variant discovery using Oxford Nanopore sequencing data from classic Drosophila melanogaster mutant strains.
Together with my PI, Dr. Mahul Chakraborty, I developed and taught a Genomics Lab section designed to accompany his lecture course (BIOL 450) and introduce students to modern bioinformatics approaches. We taught this course in Spring 2024, 2025, and 2026, each time generating new datasets that allowed students to gain hands-on research experience with previously unpublished data.
In Spring 2026, students learned core approaches in genome assembly and differential gene expression analysis. I am making these slides available with the hope that they may serve as a resource for instructors interested in developing similar courses at other universities, as well as for students or researchers pursuing self-guided learning.
Many of the slides, commands, and instructions are tailored to the Texas AM high performance computing cluster, but I hope they are clear enough to be adapted to other institutions computing environments. The datasets used in the Spring 2026 course are not yet publicly available, but will be released alongside a forthcoming manuscript, similar to my work on visible phenotypes in classic Drosophila melanogaster mutant strains.
If you are interested in using or adapting these materials, please feel free to contact me!