Basics of Bioinformatics

Basic biological knowledge about proteins, RNA and DNA.

This is a practical workshop, which will introduce basics of bioinformatics. It is aimed at people with basic biological background and knowledge in molecular biology, who want to learn how to process and work with biological data using computational tools. It has been designed especially for:

• Researchers working in experimental laboratories on biological macromolecules proteins, RNA and DNA.
• Scientists whose main area of expertise is not biology, but they need to cope with biological data.
• Managers introducing new products (e.g. drugs), who want to broaden their knowledge about nowadays bioinformatics.
• Computer programmers who are going to write programs dealing with biological molecules.

The course is divided into two parts: theoretical and practical. The lecture is interwoven with simple practical exercises, quizzes and tests to make sure that attendees understand the concepts.

During the training we will take you along a guided tour that covers all the basic aspects of biological data analysis. This workshop is an ideal opportunity to get familiar with bioinformatics and its many faces! At the end, you should be able to tackle any basic bioinformatics problem: you will know where to get the required data from, how to obtain relevant information and how basic software and algorithms work. Our aim is to facilitate your understanding of biological data.

By the end of the course you will be able to work with biological data using bioinformatics tools.

• Introduction
• Sequence alignments
• BLAST and its Applications
• Translation tools
• Primer Designing
• Epitope Prediction
• Secondary structure prediction
• Phylogenetic analysis