Bioinformatics

Catalog description

Introduction to methods for acquir - ing, analyzing, and employing biological sequence information. Topics will include- Theory and process of PCR, mass spectroscopy, and DNA microarrays. Algorithms for searching and clustering sequences. Ap - plications of bioinformatic data to questions such as the geographical movement of Zika virus, horizontal gene transfer in bacterial viruses, and changes in human gene expression in response to disease and treat- ment. Students will access remote sequence databases (NCBI, EMBL- EBI) and analyze sequences with open source bioinformatics software running natively, in a Linux virtual machine, and on remote servers. Analyses will include protein structure prediction, phylogenetics using molecular data, and genome annotation. Students will annotate a novel