Introduction to Bioinformatics

Topics covered will include biological sequences, programming in python, UNIX, sequence alignments, sequence phylogeny, sequence database searches, gene prediction, and whole genome analysis, including transcriptome and microarray analysis, gene clustering and application of statistics to gene profiling data.

We will emphasize the fundamental theory behind the analysis, and also present practical problems and their solutions. The course will use open-source bioinformatics tools, and show how to construct such tools using biopython, a set of libraries for bioinformatics in the python programming language.

The course is designed for graduate and advanced undergraduate students in biology. A basic knowlege of molecular biology is assumed. Students from other disciplines are invited to participate, but will have to make up the background