Bioinformatics is a new and rapidly evolving discipline that has emerged from the fields of molecular biology and biochemistry, and from the algorithms disciplines of computer science. The official definition of bioinformatics is "the research, development, or application of computational tools and approaches for expanding the use of biological, medical, behavioral or health data, including those to acquire, store, organize, archive, analyze, or visualize such data". This course provides an introduction to the features of biological data, how that data are organized and how the existing data resources can be utilized efficiently by computer programs to solve a variety of biological problems. It will cover database searching and sequence analysis of DNA and protein sequences, phylogenetic analysis, visualizing and predicting protein structures, and a computer language Python to facilitate the analysis.

The prerequisite to this course is a basic understanding of molecular biology and computer programming, which are covered in BIOL 101 Biology I and CSCI 101 Computer Programming I. The AP biology and AP computer programming courses in high school are also sufficient. You are encouraged to speak to the instructors to gain permission.

The course will have 3 one hour lectures and a 75 minute lab.

Outline of the syllabus

1. Introduction to informatics (computer technology) and its achievement (Human Genome Project)
2. Introduction to DNA sequences and protein sequences (the central dogma)
3. Introduction to a bioinformatics workstation (Unix, file systems, shell, web)
4. NCBI Data Model and GenBank
5. Sequence alignment and database searching . FASTA and BLAST
6. Phylogenetic analysis
7. Structure Database - PDB
8. Visualizing and predicting protein structures
9. Introduction to Python and Bio-Python