R for molecular bioscientists

Overview

Programme overview

Participants can import, inspect, transform, visualise and document a small biological dataset in R without relying on manual spreadsheet steps.

Audience

Who should attend

Laboratory scientists and early-stage researchers who work with experimental tables but have limited experience writing reproducible analysis code.

Capability gained

Learning outcomes

• Work safely with R objects, vectors and data frames
• Import delimited data while preserving source files
• Inspect types, missingness and identifiers before analysis
• Filter, join, reshape and summarise experimental tables
• Produce labelled, interpretable scientific graphics
• Write a small reusable function and render a documented analysis
• Recognise when statistical or domain review is required

Structure

Curriculum

1. 01R, RStudio and a reproducible project layout
2. 02Objects, functions, packages, vectors and data frames
3. 03Import, data types, missing values and validation checks
4. 04Tidy transformations, joins and grouped summaries
5. 05Scientific visualisation and honest graphical choices
6. 06Functions, scripts and avoiding copy-paste analysis
7. 07Reproducible documents, file paths and session capture

Preparation

Prerequisites

No previous programming is required. Participants need routine familiarity with biological experiments and tabular data. Assessment uses a supplied non-sensitive dataset.