Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics

The aim of this course is to provide the students of a solid background in Molecular biology and Bioinformatics that can help them in understanding the future development of this area. Beside the description of basic processes such as DNA replication, transcription and translation both in prokaryotes and eukaryotes, the final part of the Molecular Biology program will be devoted to some examples of regulation of these processes and of the function of proteins that are the final executers of the genetic program of a cell.
In addition the students will acquaint with the principles of some basic molecular biology techniques and with the use of software for sequence analysis and for the query of sequence databases. Indeed, these are fundamental tools in era of genome sequencing and post-genomic analyses. Therefore the course consists of a part of molecular biology (9CFU) and a second part of bioinformatics (3 CFU). The aim of the Bioinformatics part is to provide the students of the main knowledge that will be useful to: (i) understand the biological data associated to the huge amount of sequence data stored in the biological database; (ii) query the sequence databases with the appropriate tools; and (iii) use and correctly understand the results of sequence similarity search tools based on local or global similarity searches.

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