Bioinformatics plays a crucial role in the storage, search, and analysis of biomolecular sequence and structure data. A significant amount of data is now available on the web, along with software tools for data search and analysis. It is essential that professionals working with biological sequences or structures in public and private sectors are knowledgeable about these databases and tools.

This practical course introduces the main public domain tools, databases and methods used in bioinformatics, including DNA and protein databases such as Genbank and PBD, software tools such as BLAST, and methods for aligning sequences. Topics include multiple alignment, phylogenetic analysis, microarrays and system biology. The course emphasizes the needs of the user of bioinformatics tools and databases, rather than complex algorithm development and advanced computational methods.

The course includes computer lab exercises and online demonstrations of the various databases and tools on the web. It is intended both for life scientists and computer engineers and is the recommended first course for those wanting to gain skills in bioinformatics.

Learning Outcomes

At the conclusion of the course, you should be able to

• Understand the need and importance of bioinformatics in industry and research
• Learn how to access and use bioinformatics tools and databases on the internet
• Learn how to evaluate DNA and protein sequences using bioinformatics tools from the internet
• Learn how to predict and understand protein structure using homology and comparative modeling
• Learn how bioinformatics is used in the fields of genomics and proteomics

Topics include

• The subspecialties of bioinformatics
• Sequence alignment
• The basics of molecular biology
• Single nucleotide polymorphisms and genome-wide association studies

Additional Information

We will download the Sars-CoV-2 reference genome from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) database; do BLAST to compare sequence similarity with bat RaTG13 CoV; use Clustal Omega, MUSCLE and T-COFFEE for multiple sequence alignment