Practical Bioinformatics

Catalog description

Practical aspects of retrieving and analyzing biological information residing in common databases. BIOL 439 Practical Bioinformatics (3) This course focuses on practical aspects of biological databases and analyses of molecular data. Students will learn about vast resources available, how to access them, and retrieve only the desired information. Sequence comparison and alignment methods will be presented. We will discuss practical aspects of such algorithms as dot matrix plots, dynamic programming, BLAST, and FASTA. Different strategies of multiple alignments will be discussed as well. We will cover computational genomics and computational analysis of gene expression. Students will learn how to assemble short sequences into long contigs and how to infer biological information from raw sequence data. They will learn how to analyze protein sequences including secondary structure prediction, protein function prediction (based on motifs and functional domains), and structural modeling. The whole course will be well balanced between theoretical description of computational biology methods and practical aspects of bioinformatics (some sessions will meet in computer classrooms)Upon completion of this course, students will have sufficient knowledge to retrieve a desired information from biological databases based on both text and sequence data. They will learn what public resources are available in term of databases and a software. They will know how to interpret results in biological context and how to adjust different parameters in the software to get exact desired results.This course will be one of several courses that are available to students in the genetics and developmental biology and general options in the biology program along with the biology minor.