Training in High-Throughput Sequencing: Common Guidelines to Enable Material Sharing, Dissemination, and Reusability

The advancement of high-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies and the rapid development of numerous analysis algorithms and pipelines in this field has resulted in an unprecedentedly high demand for training scientists in HTS data analysis. Embarking on developing new training materials is challenging for many reasons. Trainers often do not have prior experience in preparing or delivering such materials and struggle to keep them up to date. A repository of curated HTS training materials would support trainers in materials preparation, reduce the duplication of effort by increasing the usage of existing materials, and allow for the sharing of teaching experience among the HTS trainers’ community. To achieve this, we have developed a strategy for materials’ curation and dissemination. Standards for describing training materials have been proposed and applied to the curation of existing materials. A Git repository has been set up for sharing annotated materials that can now be reused, modified, or incorporated into new courses. This repository uses Git; hence, it is decentralized and self-managed by the community and can be forked/built-upon by all users. The repository is accessible at http://bioinformatics.upsc.se/htmr.Author Summary: In recent years, the advancement of high-throughput sequencing (HTS) and the rapid development of numerous analysis algorithms and pipelines in this field have resulted in an unprecedentedly high demand for training scientists in HTS data analysis. Generating effective training materials is time-consuming, and a large body of training materials on HTS data analysis has already been generated but is rarely shared among trainers. In this paper we provide guidelines to trainers for describing training materials to increase their reusability. The best practices standards proposed here have been used to annotate a collection of HTS training materials, which is now available to the trainers’ community in Git and discoverable through the ELIXIR and GOBLET portals. Efforts are now underway to utilize the strategy presented in this paper to annotate a wider collection of training materials and define a generic approach for the curation and dissemination of materials that should be adopted by existing training portals and new emerging initiatives.