Pevzner and Compeau Are Splitting Their Bioinformatics Course into Three

Here is great news for busy people interested in learning bioinformatics from the masters. This year, Pevzner and Compeau are splitting their Bioinformatics I course in Coursera into three independent courses. Self-learners can also try youtube videos from last year here, and use problem-solving tool Rosalind. We reviewed their excellent book here.

The three-part courses are listed below -

Finding Hidden Messages in DNA (Bioinformatics I)

This course begins a series of classes illustrating the power of computing in modern biology. Please join us on the frontier of bioinformatics to look for hidden messages in DNA without ever needing to put on a lab coat. After warming up our algorithmic muscles, we will learn how randomized algorithms can be used to solve problems in bioinformatics.

Assembling Genomes and Sequencing Antibiotics (Bioinformatics II)

Biologists still cannot read the nucleotides of an entire genome or the amino acids of an antibiotic as you would read a book from beginning to end. However, they can read short pieces of DNA and weigh small antibiotic fragments. In this course, we will see how graph theory and brute force algorithms can be used to reconstruct genomes and antibiotics.

Comparing Genes, Proteins, and Genomes (Bioinformatics III)

After sequencing genomes, we would like to compare them. We will see that dynamic programming is a powerful algorithmic tool when we compare two genes (i.e., short sequences of DNA) or two proteins. When we “zoom out” to compare entire genomes, we will employ combinatorial algorithms.