Next-generation sequencing (NGS) is one of the fundamental technological developments of the decade in life sciences. Whole genome sequencing (WGS), RAD-Seq, RNA-Seq, Chip-Seq, and several other technologies are routinely used to investigate important biological problems. These are also called high-throughput sequencing technologies, and with good reason: they generate vast amounts of data that needs to be processed. NGS is the main reason that computational biology has become a big-data discipline. More than anything else, this is a field that requires strong bioinformatics techniques.
Here, we will not discuss each individual NGS technique per se (this would require a whole book on its own). We will use an existing WGS dataset and the 1,000 Genomes Project to illustrate the most common steps necessary to analyze genomic data. The recipes presented here will be easily...
