BIOL 4425

Bioinformatics

4425 Bioinformatics (3-3). Introduction to methods for acquiring, analyzing, and employing biological sequence information. Topics will include- Theory and process of PCR, mass spectroscopy, and DNA microarrays. Algorithms for searching and clustering sequences. Applications of bioinformatic data to questions such as the geographical movement of Zika virus, horizontal gene transfer in bacterial viruses, and changes in human gene expression in response to disease and treatment. Students will access remote sequence databases (NCBI, EMBL-EBI) and analyze sequences with open source bioinformatics software running natively, in a Linux virtual machine, and on remote servers. Analyses will include protein structure prediction, phylogenetics using molecular data, and genome annotation. Students will annotate a novel viral genome and submit the completed annotation to NCBI. (Credit may not be earned for this course and Biology 5425.)

Units: 4.0