I will be further developing the course content this summer. Do not hesitate to contact me for suggesting topics. Your feedback is most welcomed!
A short introduction to bioinformatics can be found here:
Watch this web page for further announcements about the course.
The first lecture will be held on Friday, September 11 2009, from 16:00 to 19:00, in FTX 316.
Finding the sequence - even the full range of sequences - is, though, just the beginning. You then have to do something useful with the result. This is where the computing comes in. Computers allow individual genomes - all 3 billion base pairs of them - to be compared. And not only human genomes. Cross-species comparisons are enormously valuable. Laboratory experiments on creatures ranging from yeast to mice can reveal the functions of genes in these species. Computer comparison then shows which human genes correspond in DNA sequence and thus, presumably, in function, to the genes in these "model" organisms. Cross-species comparison also shows how species differ, and thus how they have diverged. Comparing DNA from populations within a species can show how that species is evolving. Comparing DNA from individuals within a population can explain why those individuals differ from one another. And comparing the DNA from cells within an individual can show how tissues develop and become differentiated from one another, and what goes wrong in diseases like cancer.Biology 2.0, The Economist, The Economist Newspaper Limited, Jun 17, 2010