Decoding transcriptomes: A practical course on RNA-seq 2026

Welcome to the Courses@CRG: Decoding Transcriptomes: A practical course on RNA-seq at the Center for Genomic Regulation in beautiful Barcelona! We are thrilled to have you as part of our community, and we extend our warmest greetings to you. At Courses@CRG, we are committed to providing you with an exceptional learning experience, and we are excited to announce that we will be covering a comprehensive range of topics during this program.

The course integrates laboratory practice with computational training, equipping participants with the skills needed to design robust RNA-seq experiments and to apply reproducible analysis workflows following the FAIR practices. The program is complemented by theoretical lectures on state-of-the-art transcriptomics and bioinformatics, a guided visit to the CRG Genomics Unit, and networking activities.

By the end of this course, you will have gained a solid, up-to-date understanding of transcriptomics and next-generation sequencing (NGS), including the key differences between bulk RNA-seq, single-cell sequencing, and spatial transcriptomics, and you will be able to design RNA-seq experiments for diverse applications, perform RNA and library quality control and prepare mRNA libraries, understand major NGS platforms and sequencing workflows, assess RNA-seq data quality and work with common file formats, carry out reproducible RNA-seq data analysis from QC to differential expression, and functionally interpret results through approaches such as gene set enrichment analysis, equipping you with practical skills to advance your research and career.