BIOL 486 - Introduction to Bioinformatics

3 Credits
This course is designed to equip students with the basic skills in bioinformatics that use the power of computer science to address biological questions from several scientific disciplines to analyze proteins for drug development, annotate novel genomes, and examine evolutionary relationships. The topics covered in this class provide an application focus and include sequence and structure location in publicly accessible databases, genomic organization with some emphasis on eukaryotic genomics, sequence alignments, structural alignments, multiple sequence alignments, phylogeny, domain identification, protein modeling, active site recognition, ligand docking, systems biology, metabolic pathway regulation and gene expression.

Grade Note(s): All BIOL prefixed courses required for the BS Biological Sciences degree program require a C or better grade for successful completion.
All BIOL prefixed courses taken as requirements in the Nursing programs require a C or better grade for successful completion.
Prerequisite(s): BIOL 336, BITS 212, and STAT 219 or STAT 220
Recommended Prerequisite(s): CHEM 310 and CHEM 310L
Course Learning Outcomes:
1. Construct phylogenies.
2. Synthesize potential secondary structures and ligand binding.
3. Evaluate existing microarray data for its role in human variation and disease.
4. Analyze protein and DNA sequences using various bioinformatics programs.
5. Analyze gene structure and genomic assembly.
6. Analyze open reading frames, promoters, and regulatory regions from DNA sequences.
7. Describe bioinformatics algorithms.