Will be offered for the first time spring 2020

The course provides an introduction to the field of bioinformatics including key concepts and algorithms, the development of the field historically, its applications and relevant ethical considerations. The course covers the basics of bioinformatics sequence analysis and related tools and databases. Topics covered are global and local pairwise alignment, score matrices, sequence database search, p- and e-values and measures of classification performance. The course also reviews the necessary basics of molecular biology and in particular the concepts of genomes and genes and includes an introduction to genome browsers and central biological databases and knowledge bases.

On completion of the course the student should have the following learning outcomes defined in terms of knowledge, skills and general competence:

Knowledge

The student

• Has a general understanding of central topics and concepts within the field of bioinformatics
• Understands dynamic programming algorithms for alignment of biological sequences
• Understands and be able to explain basics of molecular biology and evolution pertaining to sequence alignment and connect them with the various algorithms
• Is able to compare technical aspects of pairwise local and global sequence alignment algorithm
• Has basic understanding of what a genome is and how a genome browser can be used to represent and explore genome level data
• Knows principles and examples of biological databases and knowledge bases
• Knows the algorithms behind sequence similarity search, in particular BLAST
• is able to create working implementations of basic bioinformatics algorithms and to use such algorithms for analysis of concrete data
• is able to use and understand different classification performance measures in the fields of biological sequence analysis
• Has an understanding of application areas of bioinformatics including ethical considerations and aspects

Skills

The student can

• use selected bioinformatics databases, genome browsers, and tools in an informed way
• set up scripts to perform simple analysis pipelines

General competence

The student is able to

• work in inter-disciplinary teams to address biological questions using computational approaches

The course is given as lectures and mandatory exercises

Lectures, 2 hours per week

Exercises, 4 hours per week

The forms of assessment are:

• Compulsory assignments, 30 % of total grade.
• Written examination (3 hours), 70% of total grade.

All compulsory assignments must be approved before examination.

Due to the measures taken to avoid the spread of SARS-CoV-2, UiB is closed for teaching and assessment. As a consequence, the following changes is made to assessment spring semester 2020:

• Written home examination instead of written examination

Student adviser:

mailto:studieveileder@ii.uib.noStudent adviser

T: 55 58 42 00