Bioinformatics

Catalog description

Bioinformatics is a field that leverages computational techniques to understand biology, especially through the study of genes, genomes, and other large molecular datasets. Drawing from fields ranging from computer science to statistics and machine learning, we can answer questions about evolution and the fundamental principles of biology. Students in this course will practice basic command line programming to process datasets, use common software for bioinformatics analyses, and learn the fundamental concepts underlying the generation and analysis of large molecular datasets. Students will use real biological data to formulate and address a research question with a bioinformatics pipeline they design during the semester. Students must have access to a laptop or computer capable of running the Unix shell for lab sessions (e.g., Terminal on macOS, Cygwin on Windows). A limited number of laptops are available for in-class use in the Department of Natural Sciences. Laptops also may be borrowed from the library on a weekly or semester-long basis.