HEIG-VD
Bioinformatics

Summer 2008: July 14 to July 31

Helpful links

Information about the Instructor

Name: Sami Khuri, visiting professor from San José State University
Office: No office will be given to us.
Phone: No phones will be given to us.
Office Hours: By appointment only.
Email: khuri@cs.sjsu.edu

Course Description

The course is an introduction to Bioinformatics.
The need to understand the immense amount of data produced by large scale DNA sequencing is of paramount importance. Demands for sophisticated analysis of biological sequences are the driving force behind the rapidly expanding research area of bioinformatics.
This practical course provides an introduction to the main public domain tools, databases and methods in bioinformatics, including DNA and protein databases, such as Genbank and Swiss-Prot, software tools such as those at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and other web accessible applications. More precisely, the course introduces the methods for collecting, editing, and storing macromolecular sequences, for pairwise and multiple sequence alignments, for database searching for similar sequences, gene prediction, RNA secondary structure analysis and for phylogenetic prediction.

Remarks
No prior knowledge of Biology is required. In other words, biology is not a prerequisite for this course. But an interest in Biology is. I will spend the first lecture of the course going over some notions in molecular biology (mainly the following Biology Terms) that will be needed for the course.
We have two rooms at our disposal for the course. The lectures will be given in T153 and the hands-on exercises (praticals in British - travaux pratiques in French) will be conducted in the computer lab: S153. We shall probably spend 40% of the time in the lecture room and the rest in the computer lab, solving hands-on exercises. The purpose of the hands-on exercises is to develop your understanding of the material. Please keep your laptops closed during the lectures. You will get a hard copy of the slides and so will not need to put on your computers during the lectures.

Lecture Material and Schedule

Recommended Textbooks (Not required)