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Semester 1

Bioinformatics 1 (INFR11160)

Subject

Informatics

College

SCE

Credits

10

Normal Year Taken

4

Delivery Session Year

2023/2024

Pre-requisites

Course Summary

This is an introductory course for the discipline of Bioinformatics for students from both physical science and life science backgrounds. Bioinformatics is an inter-disciplinary subject that develops and implements novel methodologies and tools for analysing and learning from biological data. These data are increasingly large and complex because of significant technological developments and their application at scale in biological and biomedical application areas.In this course, we will cover the fundamental domain knowledge needed from both biological and computational disciplines to enable further study and research in this subject with a strong emphasis on practical applications of the taught methods.

Course Description

In this course, we will introduce key biological concepts including the main types of molecules we study (DNA, RNA, and protein) and the cell biological processes involved in the regulation and function of biological systems. The cornerstone of foundational Bioinformatics lies in the analysis of sequences; strings of characters that encode genetic information in organisms. We will describe the theory and put into practice how we work with and analyse these sequences using a range of databases, algorithms, and tools. You will undertake mini research projects using publicly available data to put your learning into practice. The course is taught using Python; students need to be comfortable with basic coding in Python as this is required to use the course notebooks each week and for the assessed coursework.Topics change slightly each year, but typically include:pairwise and multiple sequence alignment, biological databases, ontologies & functional enrichment analysis, network analysis, multi-omics analysis (transcriptomics, proteomics, methylomics), and biomedical text analytics.

Assessment Information

Written Exam 0%, Coursework 100%, Practical Exam 0%

Additional Assessment Information

This course will be assessed by two major pieces of coursework.

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