Bioinformatics and Biostatistics

Bioinformatics (6 CFU)
Introduction: definition and aims of Bioinformatics. Genome projects and next-generation sequencing. Gene and genome annotations. A bioinformatic view of the structure of protein-coding genes: exons, introns, promoters, and alternative splicing. The structure of mature eukaryotic mRNAs. Primary and specialized biological databases. Genome browsers. Definition of sequence similarity, homology, orthology, and paralogy. Global and local alignments. Scoring matrices for nucleotide and amino acid sequence alignments (PAM and BLOSUM). BLAST sequence similarity search: algorithm and usage. Multiple sequence alignments. Expression data: microarray and RNA-Seq. Functional gene annotation and gene ontology.

Biostatistics (3 CFU)
Data representation and variable types. Tables, scatterplots and histograms. Mean, median, mode, percentiles. Variance and standard deviation. Definition of probability and conditional probability. Distributions of random variables: normal distribution, hypergeometric distribution, binomial distribution, Poisson distribution. Sampling and sampling distributions. Statistical hypothesis testing: Student's t-test.