ABC - Applied Bioinformatics Course
Welcome Welcome to ABC - the web site of Applied Bioinformatics Course. We`ll learn, step by step, the ABCs of: How to access various bioinformatics resources on the Internet. How to query and search biological databases. How to use bioinformatics tools to analyze your own DNA or protein sequences. How to construct a phylogenetic tree for the bunch of sequences at your hand. How to predict the three dimensional structure of your favorite protein. And lots more! How we learn We will run the course in a training room. Each student will have a PC connected into the Internet. We start with introducing the international bioinformatics resources around the world, for example, NCBI and EBI. We then use the WebLab bioinformatics platform developed by CBI, to get familiar with dozens of bioinformatics tools through hands-on practice. We will do a lot of exercises for sequence alignment, database similarity search, motif finding, gene prediction, as well as phylogenetic tree construction and molecular modeling. Finally, we will focus on several projects to solve real biological problems. You are encouraged to bring your own problems to discuss and, hopefully, to solve during the course! You may read a brief introduction and the outline (in Chinese) of the course, or read the article Teaching the ABC of Bioinformatics (in English), or ABC Examples (in Chinese) for more details. What you need before the course A desktop PC or laptop hooked to the Internet. Good background of biochemistry and molecular biology - you may try the (self-test) to see how good at it you are. Ability to read in English such as the contents of this page. At least three hours every week to have group discussions and to stick on the Internet to do exercises and homework assigments. What you gain from the course Don`t expect to become a bioinformatics expert at the end of the course, but you will know: Half day on the Web, saves you half month in the lab!
