Aims & Learning Objectives:
Aims: To understand the concept of Bioinformatics; to become familiar with some of the most important tools of Bioinformatics; to recognise the ways in which Bioinformatics can be used to gain understandings about the biological function of genes and proteins. After taking this course the student should be able to:
* explain the basis of sequence alignment, database searching, protein structure prediction, the recognition of pattern and compositional bias and phylogenetic inference;
* show how the tools of Bioinformatics can be used in whole genome annotation, the prediction of protein functions and evolutionary relationships;
* explain the limitations of Bioinformatics methods.
Content:
Despite the title, the unit in Bioinformatics is not about computing or programming. The series of topics will cover the current methods being used to compile and understand the mass of sequence data from the human and other genome projects. It will cover pattern recognition in DNA and protein sequences, the identification of compositional biases in DNA sequences, methods of sequence alignment and database searching, prediction of protein structures, phylogenetic inference, and a discussion of how all this information can be put together in order to gain insights into biological function.
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