Structural Bioinformatics
The human genome is both the chef and the chef's recipe for building a human body. Bioinformatics is the interdisciplinary field that uses the techniques of statistics and computer science to interpret this recipe and characterize the molecular components of living systems. This course is aimed at making biological inferences from national repositories of DNA, microarray, and protein data. Topics include gene prediction, sequence alignment, phylogenetic prediction, geometric analysis of protein structure, and macromolecular simulation. Students will use the Perl programming language, cutting-edge databases, and open-source bioinformatics tools to visualize data and post their analyses online. Students are encouraged to study molecules, data bases, or genes of their own interest for a web based term project. (CHEM 0104 or CHEM 0107 or CSCI 0101 or BIOL 0145 or by waiver) 3 hrs. lect., 3 hrs. lab