Bioinformatics and computational biology

Seminar lectures and practices in informatics room on the following topics compose the course; in case, at the end of the course, an external technical visit to an experimental research laboratory, or a seminar lecture by a field expert, will take place.
- Introduction (2 hours): definitions, methodologies and motivations
- Genetic and molecular biology concepts (8 hours): organisms, cells, biological molecules and their structure, duplication and expression of genetic information, protein synthesis, structure of genes and transcripts, hints of protein structure, genome, transcriptome, proteome, hints of hereditary pathologies
- Techniques of biomolecular sequence analysis (6 hours): importance of biological sequence comparison, local or global alignment of two biomolecular sequences, sequence similarity search
- Technologies for gene expression measurement and analysis (2+4 hours): biotechnologies for gene expression measurement, computational methods for gene expression data analysis, data mining of gene expression data
- Biological network analysis (2 hours): main characteristics of a biological network, mining and visualization of complex network features, computational methods for gene network extraction and analysis, hints of gene regulatory networks
- Bio-terminologies, bio-ontologies and methodologies for their analysis (2+2 hours): functional and phenotypic annotations of genes and proteins, controlled vocabularies for genomic and proteomic annotation, Open Biomedical Ontologies: the Gene Ontology and other bio-ontologies, enrichment and similarity analysis of annotations
- Genomic and proteomic databanks (2 hours): databank types and access methodologies, main databanks and their relations, provided data and formats, search methods in databanks, integration and update of data and information
- Examples of available bioinformatics tools (20 hours): main software tools available as Web applications, Web services and freeware and open source programs.