Fndmntls of Bioinfo & Computational Bio

Catalog description

Bioinformatics and computational biology apply informatics to analyze large datasets. The wide availability of many datasets, combined with increasing computational abilities, have fueled the current "-omics" era in biology - with applications across many biological disciplines, including medicine, biotechnology, ecology, and environmental science. In this course, students will learn theory that underlies bioinformatics and computational biology, which they will apply within the laboratory setting (a hybrid of in silico and wet lab activities). Topics covered may include accessing datasets from repositories (NCBI, organismal databases), searching sequence databases, sequence alignment and motif discovery, phylogenetic analyses, analysis of protein, nucleic acid, and chromosome structures, genome mapping, transcriptional analysis, metabolomic profiling, and ribosome profiling. Three hours of lecture and three hours of laboratory per week. Carries biology major credit.