LLMs for bioinformaticians: what they are useful for, how to work with them and where they can fail

Slides and a runnable local LLM demo from the workshop LLMs for bioinformaticians, presented at NorthernBUG 17 in Liverpool on 18 September 2026, ahead of a panel discussion on the same topic.

The deck covers what an LLM is, uses in bioinformatics, prompting, choosing a model, agentic AI and how it goes wrong. The demo uses ellmer and Ollama to ask a small local model the same question with and without a tool.

Slides: cbflivuni.github.io/llms-for-bioinformaticians

Third-party figures remain under their original licences, as credited on each slide.