Practical Bioinformatics

4 units

From medicine to genomics to ecology, all fields of biology are now generating large and complex datasets that can only be analyzed using computational approaches. This course introduces computational techniques and perspectives to biologists that are new to computational thinking. Students will learn how to design research workflows, decompose complex problems into simpler solvable units, and apply scientific computing principles to research. In addition, students will practice foundational computing skills, such as using the UNIX operating system on research clusters, writing custom analysis programs with shell scripts and with Python, and summarizing and visualizing analysis output. The laboratory exercises build on one another, culminating in the construction of a bioinformatics pipeline that can process and analyze molecular data. Students will apply their newly learned computational skills and use their pipeline to analyze virus sequence evolution and explore evolutionary models.