Introduction to Bioinformatics
for Medical Research

This course introduces a wide range of bioinformatics tools and concepts for application in medical research. The course is data-centric and focuses on practical use but introduces a few basic theoretical issues too.

The course was delivered during April - July 2003 to members of the Technion Faculty of Medicine by Gideon Greenspan, with Oleg Rokhlenko as teaching assistant. Each week consisted of a 1 hour lecture, followed by a 2 hour hands-on tutorial.

Week Lecture Tools
1 Introduction to Bioinformatics PubMed, OMIM, BioMail
2 Introduction to Data Formats GenBank, SWISS-PROT, GeneCards
3 Genomic Sequence Alignment BLASTN, Pairwise BLAST, FASTA
4 Protein Sequence Alignment SIM-Prot, BLASTP
5 Advanced BLAST PSI-BLAST
6 Motifs and Motif Finding MEME/MAST
7 Motif Databases and Gene Finding TRANSFAC, BLOCKS, ORFFinder, GenScan
8 Multiple Alignment and Phylogeny ClustalW, Phylip, Phylodendron
9 Protein Secondary Structure PHDsec, PSIPRED
10 Protein Tertiary (3D) Structure PDB, TOPITS, GenTHREADER, SCOP
11 Microarrays and Expression Data EPClust, GEO
12 The Human Genome Project UCSC Genome
13 Probe Design and Gene Networks Oligodb, Primer3, KEGG
14 Genetic Mapping