Computational Biology - WMM9AM36

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)

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.

The second 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 data analyses projects and critical
reading of research articles, the focus is put on modern research
questions (microbiome, drug discovery, etc) involving large datasets and
tools from artificial intelligence.

Basic statistics (Poisson distribution), algorithmics (complexity), programming (python required, and R or matlab).