I'm designing a college course on genomics for undergrad biology majors, and I was hoping I could get some feedback/suggestions. This is a course for students that don't necessarily have any computational skills.

I'm planning to talk about the pros and cons of the various next gen sequencing technologies (illumina, pacbio, minION), teach them about some popular algorithms for sequence alignments/searching like BLAST and HMMER (from a conceptual and practical standpoint - eg what are they good for and what are the limitations?), and some current applications.

Since I work on microbial genomics, I was hoping for some suggestions for human genomics topics. Im hoping to give students curated data from various real projects for them to analyze. For example, I know plenty of microbiome studies I can use, and I can have them look at relative abundance of bacteria species from different body sites for example.

I was thinking about using data from the cancer genome Atlas, but do you have suggestions for simple questions students could ask with this data? Would probably be worth doing some RNAseq analyses as well - any other datasets that would be good for that?

Any other suggestions are welcome.