Computational biology - 5MMBIOP

Goal(s)

This interdisciplinary course is designed for students with a computational or mathematical background, providing them with the skills necessary to move into bioinformatics and computational biology. The objective is to provide an introduction to the modeling of biological phenomena, and to present advanced software and mathematical tools for the analysis of sequencing data.

Content(s)

Part I: Through a realistic bacterial outbreak scenario, the first part of the lecture will deal with omics biology from sequence to protein structure. Through a challenging project, you will need to leverage fundamental computational biology concepts and knowledge (standard tools like blast and standard biological databases) in order to implement your own algorithmic and statistical solution.

Part II: This part of the course focuses on evolutionary biology and population biology. The central concepts of the field are presented in a computational form, with emphasis on methods for modeling and simulating the phenomena studied. Through projects and critical reading of research articles, the focus is put on modern research questions involving modeling, simulations, and/or analyses of large datasets.

Basic statistics (Poisson distribution), algorithms (complexity), programming (Python or equivalent required, and optionally R or matlab for data analysis).