Introduction to Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics is an emerging field at the intersection of biology, mathematics, and computer science. Biologists increasingly use high-throughput methods to generate massive datasets, and bioinformatics harnesses the power and speed of computers to analyze these large datasets. The topics covered in this introductory course include public biological databases, sequence alignment, and analyses of genomes and transcriptomes. Students should have a basic understanding of molecular biology and introductory statistics, and will learn some simple programming skills and how to use a variety of bioinformatics software packages.