Applied Bioinformatics

Abstract

The tremendous growth of bioinformatics and computational biology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has had an associated growth in software and algorithms for studying biological sequences. This book is designed to introduce students of the life sciences with little to no programming experience to the concepts and methodologies of bioinformatics, and contemporary software applications. The majority of this course will deal with the analysis of nucleic acid sequence data. Many of these applications have web interfaces, but where possible command line software, and strategies for dealing with sequence data with the GNU/Linux command line interface (the terminal), will be used. We won’t be content to simply run commands blindly, but rather we will also learn a great deal of the equations and theory behind these methods. In addition, these notes will provide an introduction to Biopython as a tool for bioinformatics and as a framework to connect all the concepts presented. The current edition of the book may be downloaded from the Applied Bioinformatics site: http://hendrixlab.cgrb.oregonstate.edu/teaching/appliedBioinformatics.html