Methods in Bioinformatics

This course provides an introduction to computational methods applied to biological questions. After an introduction to the computational biology domain, the notion of sequence alignment, motif discovery, and protein structure will be detailed. A particular emphasis will be put on notions related to protein structure prediction and methods related to DNA and RNA sequencing data analysis.

This course focuses on computational biology. The goal of this course is to provide students with the necessary skills: i) to understand computational biology research, ii) to grasp the workings of some of the key algorithms that were developed to solve particular problems in molecular biology, iii) to understand the role of different computational methods in solving these problems, iv) to know where certain molecular data can be found and how to combine this, v) to be able to develop a project that tries to solve some problem in this domain. In addition, this knowledge will allow you to understand the literature on bioinformatics and computational biology.

Cours co-requis

Lectures and project

References, bibliography, and recommended reading

Provided in the slides.

Contacts

Matthieu Defrance

Département d'Informatique

Université Libre de Bruxelles

Boulevard du Triomphe CP 212

1050 Brussels

Belgium

Tel: 02/650.58.68

Email: mathieu.defrance@ulb.be

Campus

Plaine

Method(s) of evaluation

• Project
• Oral presentation

Project

Oral presentation

The exam will consist of a student presentation of a scientific article, in which the context, methodology, results, conclusions, and the ability to reproduce the findings must be clearly discussed.

The final grade for this course will reflect both the quality of the project itself (reproduction of the findings from the article) and the quality of its presentation, with particular attention to depth of understanding, clarity of communication, and the ability to respond thoughtfully to questions.

Mark calculation method (including weighting of intermediary marks)

Oral presentation.

Language(s) of evaluation

• english