Practical Bioinformatics

4 units

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 how to use the UNIX operating system on research clusters, write custom analysis programs with shell scripts and with Python, and summarize and visualize 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.