Basic Bioinformatician Course

Basic Bioinformatician Course Allows You To Develop The Basic Bioinformatician Skills

Being a Bioinformatician means you’ve to learn how to retrieve and analyze biological data in the most efficient way, to learn how to align & analyze biological sequences to predict the evolutionary histories between them, to find out the conserved patterns, to learn how to predict coding regions or genes from a raw nucleotide sequence, and much more.

To efficiently deal with huge genomic and proteomic data often requires writing short scripts or patches of code to computationally analyze the biological datasets, rather than comparing and analyzing such huge datasets manually. Hence, the major part of Bioinformatics involves computationally analyzing biological datasets.

In this course you’ll learn the very basics of most commonly utilized biological databases, how to find conserved and variable regions within sequence alignments & analysis and do evolutionary & phylogenetic analysis. You’ll also be able to write your first script in Python & R, Python data structures such as lists, strings, dictionaries and various built-in functions and packages provided by R. Along with, how to read/write Bioinformatics files, work with loops and how to control the flow of your program and script.

Joining and learning from the Basic Bioinformatician Course can enhance your biological career by learning through various useful & informative pre-recorded lectures on Bioinformatics tools, databases, servers and biological programming in Python.

The foundation: databases, alignment, phylogenetics, and both languages

This is the first rung of our bioinformatician ladder — 18 hours 8 minutes across nine sections, covering the skills every subsequent course assumes you already have. It is deliberately broad rather than deep: you meet each core area once, properly, and finish able to do useful work in all of them.

What it covers

• Bioinformatics databases — NCBI, UCSC, Ensembl, UniProt, the PDB, InterPro and Phytozome: what each holds and when to reach for it.
• File formats — the formats that carry biological data between tools, and how to convert cleanly between them.
• Protein databases and analysis — retrieving and characterising proteins.
• Sequence alignment — pairwise and multiple alignment, and reading an alignment critically.
• Phylogenetic analysis — building, visualising and interpreting trees.
• Genomics tools — the standard utilities for working with genomic intervals and annotations.
• Python and R — introductions to both, including iterables, control flow, file handling, functions and modules.

Where this sits against the other tiers

Three courses share this foundation, and the difference is scope:

• Basic Bioinformatician (this course) — the core areas plus introductions to both Python and R. Start here if you want the widest foundation for the least time.
• Fundamental Bioinformatician in Python — the same core, but Python only and in more depth. Choose it if you already know you want Python.
• Introductory Bioinformatician — roughly 32 hours, adding structure prediction, 3D visualisation and evaluation, gene prediction and protein–protein interaction databases. The natural next step after this one.

What you can do afterwards

Retrieve data from any major biological database, convert between the common formats, run and interpret alignments, build a phylogenetic tree, and write basic scripts in Python and R. That is enough to be useful in a research group and enough to follow more specialised training without getting stuck on prerequisites.

Who it suits

Life-science students and researchers beginning bioinformatics with no computational background. No coding experience is assumed.