| Objectives |
Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field at the interface of life sciences and computational sciences that deals with the development and application of methods for storing, retrieving, and, in particular, analyzing biological data. The massive data amounts produced by recent and currently emerging high-throughput biotechnologies provide unprecedented potentials, but also pose yet unseen computational challenges – making bioinformatics an essential success factor for the advancement of fields, such as, molecular biology, genetics, medicine, and pharmacology.
This course focuses on basic methods for comparing biological sequences, such as, DNA, RNA, and amino acid sequences. This is complemented by an introduction to the field of phylogenetics, which is concerned with identifying evolutionary relationships among groups of organisms. No prior knowledge in biology is required for this course. Basics of molecular biology are provided up to the minimum that is necessary to understand the ideas behind the bioinformatics tools and algorithms discussed in this lecture.
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