Course Overview, Practical Bionformatics Lab, Spring 2005

BIOS 499/599, Practical Bioinformatics Lab
Spring 2005
Gale Life Sciences, #208

Instructor: Mitch D. Day
E-mail: daymitc@isu.edu
Phone: 208.223.7788
Office Hours: TBD

Important Course Links
Syllabus

FASTA data for final exam
PCR Animation (BIG FILE! 76Mb)

Course Overview

This course will introduce active biological researchers to the practical skills they will need to incorporate bioinformatics into their tool kit. This practical programming course will be fast-paced and experimental. Highly motivated students from all backgrounds are encouraged to join.

The modern landscape of bioinformatics requires knowledge of a wide variety of platforms, operating systems and programming methods. A practicing biologist cannot possibly become expert in all of the computational skills necessary to do bioinformatic research. The emerging model for bioinformatic research is for practicing biologists to collaborate with bioinformaticians.

Therefore, the guiding principle of the course is to equip biologists with the vocabulary and concepts that they will need to clearly communicate their research questions in bioinformatic terms. Practically, this will mean a lot of hands-on programming practice, writing and group discussion about programming tools and concepts. Ideally, this course will be the starting point for long-term explorations of the topics presented. Active participants will surely gain skills that will streamline data-manipulation and -mining aspects of their research.