Course description

Major technological advances in affordable nucleic acid sequencing have allowed for an explosion of sequencing data and molecular tools available for researchers in biological sciences. This provides the opportunity for ecologists, evolutionary biologists and molecular biologists to incorporate bioinformatic analyses into their existing research program to approach their research questions from an interdisciplinary angle. The aim of the course is to provide the students with a general understanding of several major bioinformatics concepts and tools commonly used in biology and molecular biology. More specifically, the students should gain basic knowledge and practice in designing and executing bioinformatics procedures aimed at answering scientific questions in the fields mentioned above.

More specifically, the course gives an overview of the most commonly used methods within applied bioinformatics within the fields of biology and molecular biology. Areas that will be covered include: sequence databases, pairwise and multiple sequence alignment, homology searches in sequence databases and subcellular localization prediction. Several downstream analyses are performed and their utility in applied ecology, evolutionary biology and molecular biology research will be discussed with guest speakers. An overview of the algorithms and statistics behind the bioinformatics methods is included, but the primary focus of course will be on applicability, not on methodological details.