Bioinformatics

(3 Credits)

This practical course in bioinformatics emphasizes the use of computers as a tool in molecular biology research. The course devotes approximately equal time to applications available on the Web and to those available at the School of Medicine?s Research Computing Resource. Rather than teach specific commands, discussions emphasize underlying principles that enable scientists to make better use of computer programs. Includes an introduction to the VMS operating system, the basics of computer communications (telnet, e-mail, Usenet, and the WWW), using sequence databases, similarity searching, multiple alignment, DNA sequencing, and phylogenetics.