Courses

MIMG 5215: Introduction to R programming for Biomedical Sciences

Course Director: Dr. Kejin Hu
Kejin.hu@unthsc.edu

Course Description

R is a programming language traditionally used for statistics and graphics. R is also a very popular tool for biomedical data science. Biological and biomedical scientists routinely analyze large and complex data sets (for examples, RNA-seq, ChIP-seq, scRNA-seq, ATAC-seq, and others), a task that is made easier in R. Therefore, R becomes an essential tool in the biomedical sciences for data management, processing, statistics, visualization, and communication. This course will introduce students to basic R concepts (for examples, R objects, functions, vectors, data frames, lists, factors, packages, operators, and others). Basic R skills will be covered (for examples, generating and operating R objects, vectors, data frames; input and output data to and from R; install and load R packages; plotting and visualization of data, and others). This course will use genuine biological/biomedical data for students to solve real life problems (for examples, generating box plots, violin plots, RNA-seq heat maps; annotating RNA-seq results; subsetting an RNA-seq data frame, and others).

This course functions as a primer for students to further acquire, enrich, and sharpen their R skills and solve more complex problems in the future (for example, differential expression analyses of RNA-seq data using the DESeq2 package; Peak annotation of ChIP-seq analysis using the package of ChIPpeakAnno or ChIPseeker, and others).