This course is designed to provide students, from a wide-range of disciplines in the life, biomedical and computer sciences, with a solid foundation in the availability and application of computer resources relevant to bioinformatics. In particular, the essential elements of bioinformatics (databases, search algorithms, and sequence analyses) will be introduced from the standpoint of how these resources work and how they may be applied to maximize data extrapolated from the primary sequences of nucleic acids and proteins.
Initial lectures will provide a framework of current concepts concerning nucleic acid and protein structure and organization, the informational content of biomolecules, gateways to major primary sequence databases, and local/global primary sequence alignment strategies. The remainder of this course will focus on specific examples of computer-aided dissection of genomic DNA, e.g., intron/exon assignments, as well as genomics as a resource for determining evolutionary relationships, and the effective use of public and private program suites for recombinant DNA research. In a similar fashion, protein structural informatics will be explored through all levels of organization, including the new discipline of proteomics for determining family relationships and the evolution of protein structure. Protein model visualization, as well as an introduction to "molecular modeling-by-homology" and bioengineering, will complete this course and will provide the opportunity to implement and coordinate a variety of earlier concepts.