BMI 565 Bioinformatics Programming & Scripting

Credits: 3
The purpose of this course is to equip research scientists with computational skills necessary to create and automate tools to analyze biological data. The course is divided into four sub-topics: Python programming, scripting in Unix/Linux, the BioPython library, and computational workflows. Python will be used to solve simple to sophisticated programming problems and to review general programming language paradigms such as problem abstraction, data types, file I/O, iteration, functions, and objects. There will also be an emphasis on writing Unix/Linux operating system shell scripts to automate repetitive tasks and connect multiple bioinformatics tools using files and pipes. In addition, students will learn to access public repositories to perform basic bioinformatics tasks such as annotating gene products, sequence searching, and functional queries. This course is designed to be a first-year requirement for students in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology graduate program in Biomedical Informatics.

Graded: A-F
May be taken only once for credit
Also offered as: BMI 665