To familiarize students with biological data mining from online databases and the use of various bioinformatics tools for extracting and processing biological data.

The course will provide:

• An introduction to bioinformatics with a focus on fundamental bioinformatics problems,
• Information on the tools used to compute solutions to those problems, and the theory upon which those tools are based.

Students should be able to:

1.            Explain which type of data is available from the most common protein sequence and structure databases (UniProt, GenBank, Protein Data Bank, C

2.            The candidate can explain the theories underlying the most common methods for sequence searches and sequence alignments, and in particular knows the principle and main steps for pairwise and multiple sequence alignments;

Recommended Books

1.   Claverie, J.M. and Notredame, C. 2014. Bioinformatics for Dummies, 4th  Edition. Wiley Publishing.

2.   Xiong, J. 2016. Essential Bioinformatics, 3rd  Edition. Cambridge University Press.

ASSESSMENT CRITERIA

• Sessional: 15%

• Presentation: 10%
• Participation:  5%

• Practical: 25%
• Final exam: 38%
• Midterm exam: 22 %