Courses home > Introduction to bioinformatics

The advent of high-throughput sequencing, microarray technology, genomics and proteomics has generated a wealth of data. Bioinformatics is a rapidly growing recently developed field which gives us the opportunity to gain new insights into the biology of organisms by the analysis of this huge amount of data. It combines the fields of computer science, mathematics and biology, and involves the study of the methods and problems associated with the task of bringing information to a researcher, sorting this mass of information in a meaningful way and then analyzing it. It involves the construction of bioinformatics pipelines which may include many different programs written for a specific purpose, and which can then be used by the researcher to answer diverse questions which arise in their fields.

Bioinformatics addresses:

biological data storage and retrieval

ab initio and knowledge-based prediction methods

biological data mining and analysis

visualization of biological data and information

This course will give an introduction to some of the more commonly used and more useful bioinformatics tools available on the web.

Further questions can be addressed to Lucy Skrabanek


[ tutorials ]

Bioinformatics
Sequence retrieval
Homology searching
Sequence alignment
Phylogenetic analysis
Promoter analysis


[ additional information ]

Databases of relevance to molecular biology and network sites

Letter codes for sequences

BLOSUM45 matrix

BLOSUM62 matrix

BLOSUM80 matrix

PAM30 matrix

PAM70 matrix

News
March, 2012; Michelle Sahai, Ph.D., a Postdoctoral Associate in Harel Weinstein's lab, was awarded a three year Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Fellowship for her research on Molecular Mechanisms of the Dopamine Transporter Function: The effects of drugs of abuse.
Feb, 2012; Sayan Mondal, a student in Harel Weinstein's lab, won the Student Research Achievement Award at the Biophysical Society's 2012 Annual Meeting for his poster on the interaction of GPCRs with the membrane.
Jan, 2012; Jan Dlabal, a student from the Lycée Français de New York, was selected as a semi-finalist in the 2012 Intel Science Talent Search, for work on the determination of large-scale genomic structure performed in the lab of Olivier Elemento.
Oct, 2011; Sheila Nirenberg presented a talk, "Can we speak the language of the brain?", at the TEDMED 2011 conference. A Q & A session followed.
Nov, 2011; GobyWeb binary release. The Campagne laboratory has just released a binary distribution of GobyWeb. This first public release of GobyWeb makes it possible to install the tool locally for non-commercial use. Detailled installation instructions are available on the download page.
Apr, 2011; Dr. Olivier Elemento was awarded an NSF CAREER Grant, the National Science Foundation's most prestigious award in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research.
Nov, 2010; Dr. Sheila Nirenberg's work on artificial retinas has been featured in Technology Review, Wired, Scientific American, and the New Scientist.
Jul, 2009; ChIPseeqer, a comprehensive framework for analysis of ChIP-seq data developed in the Elemento lab, is now available for download. [More]

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