Bioinformatics Workshop 2013

Summer Bioinformatics Biology (BIOL 470.83/790.86, Spring 2013) Instructors: Che Martin & Slav Kendal Room:1000G HN (10th Floor, North Building Hours: Tues & Thur 11:30 am-15:00 Office Hours: Room 830 HN; Tuesday 3-5pm or by appointment Contacts: Mr Martin: cmartin@gc.cuny.edu; Mr Kendal: skendall@hunter.cuny.edu

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Course Description

Background

Biomedical research is becoming a high-throughput science. As a result, information technology plays an increasingly important role in biomedical discovery. Bioinformatics is a new interdisciplinary field formed by the merging of molecular biology and computer science techniques.Today’s biology students must therefore not only learn to perform in vivo and invitro, but also in silico research skills. Quantitative/computational biologists are expected to be in increasing demand in the 21st century.

However, the technical barrier to enter the field and perform basic research projects in a bioinformatics lab is daunting for most undergraduate students. This is mainly due to the multidisciplinary nature of quantitative biology, which requires understandings and skills in chemistry, biology, computer programming, and statistics. The Hunter Summer Bioinformatics Workshop aims to introduce bioinformatics to motivated undergraduate and high school students by lowering the barrier and dispensing the usual pre-requisites in advanced biology/chemistry courses as well as entry-level programming/statistics courses. The Workshop does not assume prior programming experience.

The workshop DOES NOT

• Replace existing advanced bioinformatics courses such as BIOL425 and STAT 319
• Teach advanced bioinformatics programming skills (e.g., advanced data structure, object-oriented Perl, BioPerl, or relational database with SQL), which are the contents of BIOL425
• Teach in-depth statistics or the popular R statistical package, although probabilistic thinking (e.g., distributions of a random variable, stochastic processes, likelihood, clustering analysis) is at the core of all bioinformatics analysis (STAT 319 teaches these topics)

To learn these advanced bioinformatics topics and skills, motivated students are encouraged to enroll in one of the Five Bioinformatics Concentrations of at Hunter. The QuBi program prepares the students for bioinformatics positions in a research lab or a biotechnology company.

Contents

This course will introduce both bioinformatics theories and practices. Topics include: database searching, sequence alignment, and basic molecular phylogenetics. The course is held in a UNIX-based instructional lab specifically configured for bioinformatics applications. Each session consists of a first-half instruction on bioinformatics theories and a second-half session of hands-on exercises.

Learning Goals

Students are expected to be able to:

• Approach biological questions evolutionarily ("Tree-thinking")
• Design efficient procedures to solve problems ("Algorithm-thinking")
• Manipulate high-volume textual data using UNIX tools, Perl and Relational Database ("Data Visualization")

Pre-requisites

This 3-credit course is designed for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. Prior experiences in the UNIX Operating System and at least one programming language are required. Hunter pre-requisites are CSCI132 (Practical Unix and Perl Programming) and BIOL300 (Biochemistry) or BIOL302 (Molecular Genetics), or permission by the instructor.

Textbook

Krane & Raymer (2003). Fundamental Concepts of Bioinformatics. Pearson Education, Inc. (ISBN 0-8053-4633-3)

This book should be available in the Hunter Bookstore, as well as through several popular retailers and resellers online.