Bioinformatics Curriculum Issues, goals, curriculum

Issues  How much do we rely on canned software vs. how much programming should students do? What type of canned software? What type of “language”?  Perl  Visual Basic  Matlab  Excel Do biologists need database training?

Issues… How much do we expect biologists to become programmers or programmers to become biologists? How much biology should be included in the course? How does one find “good” data? What is the target audience?

The answer to these questions depends upon the purpose of the class  Make biologists become programmers  Make programmers become biologists  Provide biologists with education in tool selection and training (here’s what the tools do and how to use them properly)  Teach biologists and computer scientists to collaborate effectively

Goals: Students should be able to…  Find an interesting question  Develop a hypothesis  Test it using appropriate tools  Analyze the results  Validate the results  Be able to effectively communicate results

The Topics (or units)  Biology Fundamentals?  Programming Fundamentals?  Data resources  Phylogenetic Analysis  Sequence alignments and searches  Microarray Analysis  DNA Analysis  Protein Analysis