Course - MIT/WHOI Joint Program. Introduction to Bioinformatics, Summer 2006

Molecular biology and computer science are seemingly disparate subjects.  However, they share common ground in the field of Bioinformatics, in which computer science algorithms are applied to data from molecular biology.  This is an introductory course on Bioinformatics and the computational ideas behind it.  It covers what every biologist should know about computer science.

The course has no real prerequisites other than healthy curiosity.  Given the rapid developments in Bioinformatics, it would be ridiculous for such a course to be comprehensive in any sense of the word.  Rather, the course focuses on a handful of algorithmic ideas that can be used to solve a large number of biological problems.  Although the stress on ideas is important, the course also includes some protocol centered practical approaches to bioinformatics - ones that students are likely to use in their research.  Topics to be covered include: regulatory motifs in DNA sequences, Dynamic Programming, DNA sequence alignment, CLUSTALW, graph algorithms, BLAST, Clustering Algorithms, and Phylogenetic Trees.  More information can be found at the  Course Web Site

Textbook : Neil C. Jones and Pavel A. Pevzner, "An Introduction to Bioinformatics Algorithms," MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004. (Price: $55).