Applied Bioinformatics Specialization

In this course, you will follow in the footsteps of the bioinformaticians investigating the COVID-19 outbreak by annotating the SARS-CoV-2 genome and using the annotation to design a COVID-19 diagnostic test. Whether you’re new to the world of computational biology, or you’re a bioinformatics expert seeking to learn about its applications in the COVID-19 pandemic, or somewhere in between, this course is for you! As you go through this journey, we will introduce and explain genomic concepts and give you many opportunities to practice your skills, and we will provide a series of problems with gradually increasing complexity. This second course will only discuss the annotation of the SARS-CoV-2 genome, but future courses in this series will explore follow-up bioinformatics analyses used in the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this course, you will follow in the footsteps of the bioinformaticians investigating the COVID-19 outbreak by investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2. Whether you’re new to the world of computational biology, or you’re a bioinformatics expert seeking to learn about its applications in the COVID-19 pandemic, or somewhere in between, this course is for you! As you go through this journey, we will introduce and explain genomic concepts and give you many opportunities to practice your skills, and we will provide a series of problems with gradually increasing complexity. This third course will only discuss the multiple sequence alignment and maximum-likelihood phylogenetic inference of SARS-CoV-2 genomes, but future courses in this series will explore follow-up bioinformatics analyses used in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Pathway Bioinformatics is a subfield of Bioinformatics that is concerned with computationally deriving functional insights from genomic data through analysis of molecular networks. This course will present principles and techniques from Pathway Bioinformatics, and will apply these methodologies to the search for drug targets for SARS-CoV-2. The course will begin by discussing motivations for Pathway Bioinformatics, and by presenting an overview of metabolism and of metabolic pathways. Next it will discuss machine representation of pathway data, and methods for pathway visualization. The course will describe how the metabolic pathways of an organism can be inferred from genome data, and how pathways can be used to interpret high-throughput data such as transcriptomics data. It will show how to predict the essential genes of an organism via reachability analysis, and then present a metabolic analysis of human metabolism when interacting with SARS-CoV-2 to predict SARS-CoV-2 drug targets.

In this course, you will follow in the footsteps of the bioinformaticians investigating the COVID-19 outbreak by tracing the evolution of SARS-CoV-2. Whether you’re new to the world of computational biology, or you’re a bioinformatics expert seeking to learn about its applications in the COVID-19 pandemic, or somewhere in between, this course is for you! As you go through this journey, we will introduce and explain genomic concepts and give you many opportunities to practice your skills, and we will provide a series of problems with gradually increasing complexity. This fifth course will discuss the "Italy First" hypothesis of COVID-19 origins, and it will cover bioinformatics methods for rooting and dating a phylogenetic tree inferred from SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences.