Český Krumlov, Czech Republic · 2008–2026
About
evomics
33
Editions
203
Faculty
860+
Sessions taught
1,951+
Participants
Český Krumlov, Czech Republic · 2008–2026
33
Editions
203
Faculty
860+
Sessions taught
1,951+
Participants
The workshops
evomics was a family of intensive training workshops taught between 2008 and 2026 in Český Krumlov from 2009: the Workshop on Molecular Evolution, the Workshop on Genomics, the Workshop on Phylogenomics, and the Workshop on Population and Speciation Genomics.
Workshops ran for two full weeks. Morning sessions were typically lectures from researchers actively working in the topics they taught. Afternoon and evening sessions were practicals: participants worked through real analyses on real data, with instructors on hand to debug and answer questions.
Workshops, not conferences. Every session was teaching, and every practical was hands-on. Participants left with working code for methods they could not confidently run before arriving.
It filled a gap that courses, tutorials, and documentation rarely do which is understanding a method conceptually and being able to apply it to your own data.
Location
Český Krumlov is a small medieval town in southern Bohemia, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and an unlikely venue for a genomics workshop which drew in faculty, staff and students from across the globe.
The town is compact enough that participants ran into each other constantly, in the streets, in the one coffee shop everyone ended up at, at dinner. There was nowhere to disappear to. Conversations that started in a lecture hall continued over food and continued again the next morning. This compression of time and space mattered. Two weeks in Krumlov was worth more than four weeks in a city where everyone disperses in the evening.
Lectures took place in the Town Theatre, built in the 18th century. Practicals ran in the House of the Prelate, a former monastery.
Genomics curriculum
The Workshop on Genomics ran the longest, seventeen editions, and its curriculum changed substantially between 2011 and 2026 as the methods researchers used changed. The Phylogenomics and Population Genomics workshops have their own materials and were held for fewer years and typically only every other year.
2011–2014
The sequencing era
The workshop launched as next-generation sequencing moved from core facilities to individual labs. Core topics: read alignment, assembly basics, variant calling, annotation. Most participants were encountering the data for the first time.
2015–2018
Depth and specialisation
As sequencing became routine, the curriculum deepened. Dedicated sessions on population genomics, structural variation, metagenomics, and comparative genomics. Practicals moved from toy datasets to real, larger research data.
2019–2022
Long reads and assembly
PacBio and Oxford Nanopore changed what genome assembly meant. The workshop integrated material on long-read alignment, de novo assembly of complex genomes, hybrid approaches.
2023–2026
Pangenomics, single-cell, and AI tools
The reference genome gave way to reference graphs. Single-cell methods expanded from bulk RNA-seq to spatial transcriptomics and became a dedicated track. As assembly for more organisms became more standard focus was shifted to manual curation of chromosome-scale genomes. In 2026, the curriculum introduced large language models in bioinformatics for the first time, reflecting how the field's tooling has changed.
The full session-by-session record is in the workshop archive.