Foundations of Bioinformatics is a beginner-level theoretical course designed to introduce biomedical science students to the core concepts underlying modern bioinformatics. The course assumes no prior programming or computer science background and is explicitly structured for students with wet-lab biology training.
Students will explore the landscape of biological data types generated in contemporary biomedical research, including genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic data. The course covers how these data are organized, stored, and accessed through major public databases, including NCBI, Ensembl, UniProt, and the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO).
Key topics include sequence analysis fundamentals, the principles of pairwise and multiple sequence alignment (at the conceptual level), gene annotation systems, and biological file formats (FASTA, FASTQ, SAM/BAM, VCF, GFF). Students will learn the logic underlying standard bioinformatics pipelines, including quality control, read mapping, variant calling, and expression quantification at a conceptual level that prepares them for hands-on work.
The course also introduces computational thinking principles, basic algorithm design concepts, and an overview of how statistical and machine learning methods are applied in genomics. Ethical considerations related to data sharing, privacy protection, and reproducibility are integrated throughout the curriculum.
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