Introduction to Bioinformatics

Note: Please address all e-mail questions to bif20306@wur.nl. We cannot guarantee that e-mails sent to individual contact persons will be dealt with adequately and/orin time.
Note: This course can not be combined in an individual programme with PBR34303 Genomics and Bioinformatics.

Over the last decades, a number of technologies to study DNA, RNA, proteins, metabolites and their interactions has been developed. To understand life at the molecular level, they have been applied in numerous biological and biomedical experiments. Much of the resulting data, as well as the knowledge gained in these experiments, are freely available for researchers in the form of computer databases and tools. Analysis and interpretation of experimental data in biology increasingly depends on using these bioinformatics methods efficiently and effectively. In this course, students will be given a broad overview of the field of bioinformatics, with a focus on practical application and interpretation of results from tools used in everyday biological research.

After successful completion of this course students are expected to be able to:

• Describe the most widely used bioinformatics databases and tools, and explain their applicability
• Apply bioinformatics tools to analyze genome, gene and protein sequences, and critically explain the results
• Interpret the results of computational analyses of high-throughput measurement data
• Choose a combination of databases and tools to analyze data resulting from a real-world biological experiment and motivate the choices

Assumed Knowledge:
MAT15403 Statistics 2