This page collects training slides for the UCSC Genome Browser. Each slide deck has been curated with a specific purpose, from basic navigation to interpreting clinical variants. They are self-contained web decks: open one in any browser, present it full-screen (press F), read the presenter notes (press S), or jump to any slide from its Contents page. Feel free to use them in your courses or local trainings. Contact us to suggest new slide decks or improvements to the current ones.
Basic features and navigation of the main genome browser display: configuring tracks and display modes, reading the gene model, the track groups, viewing and extracting DNA, the Table Browser, aligning sequences with BLAT, and loading your own data as custom tracks, track hubs, and sessions.
An overview of the cancer and clinical databases hosted by the Genome Browser, organized by somatic and germline diagnosis and worked on the BRAF V600E example: CIViC, COSMIC, ClinVar, and TCGA Pan-Cancer for somatic variants, and GenCC, OMIM, and gnomAD for germline questions.
How to interpret a variant end to end: the Recommended Track Sets, the regulatory and epigenetic context that non-coding variants need, worked germline (BRCA2) and somatic (BRAF V600E) examples, expression, and AI predictors such as AlphaMissense and SpliceAI.
A set of real diagnostic cases spanning variant classes, each opening as a live Genome Browser session: coding variants, splicing (deep-intronic and synonymous), non-coding and regulatory variants, structural variants (CNVs), and repeat expansions.
Ready-made, interactive teaching modules from our Education portal: the central dogma (reading frames, codons, splicing), variant effects (synonymous, missense, nonsense, frameshift), and real disease and evolution case studies. Each module is a clickable session plus a short page, ready to drop into a lecture or assignment.