Introduction to Programming for the Life Sciences

Catalog description

Introduction to programming for majors in the life sciences. The ability to write programs to perform tasks related to the organization and analysis of biological data has become a highly-valued skill for researchers in the life sciences, allowing wet-lab researchers to quickly process and sort through large amounts of data to find information relative to their own work. This course serves as an introduction to programming designed specifically for life science majors, targeting the specific skills and techniques commonly needed and explaining the fundamental methods of working with biological data while centering programming assignments around topics of interest to those studying the life sciences. Topics covered include basic programming techniques, representation and manipulation of genomic and protein sequence data, and the automated interface with BLAST and the NCBI GenBank database. Cross-listed with BIO/CSE.