Bioinformatics is certainly not number-crunching for molecular biologists, but is about the application of techniques from computer science such as data abstraction, modelling, simulation, machine learning and text mining to analyse biological data. The applications include sequence analysis, the prediction and analysis of protein structure and function, and the simulation and analysis of biochemical systems.

The Bioinformatics course will include the latest hot topics in the field and which are the focus of very exciting research programmes in the University of Glasgow:

• One of these is Systems Biology which studyies the relationships and interactions between various parts of a biological system in order to understand how the whole system functions.

• The course will also present an introduction to Synthetic Biology which involves the structured engineering of biological systems for useful purposes. We will illustrate this by looking at the work of Glasgow's undergraduate team which won the Environment and Sensor prize in last summer's iGEM competition (head-to-head with MIT and Brown University).

The course is specially designed for students who do not have training in the Life Sciences. Any biological knowledge that is needed for the course will be taught in the lectures, with ample supporting material. However, the main focus will be on the design of algorithms and use of programmes and databases. It is a very practical course, where you will be able to put your programming skills to practical use!

Computations in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology can often benefit from the exploitation of parallelism. This is a topic that will be covered on the course; students will have access to the Bioinformatics Computing Cluster which comprises 45 Sun X2200 servers each with 2 dual core processors giving 180 CPU cores for large compute jobs.

The course will be supported by members of the Bioinfomatics Research Centre. The main lecturer is Professor David Gilbert.

The format of the course is two 1-hour lectures and one practical per week.

The course can be taken at both H and M levels, with a difference in assessment for each.

The assessment comprises a coursework worth 30% plus exam worth 70% of the total mark.

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