Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics in Cancer Research

Recommended Prerequisites

NA

Teaching Methods

-The majority of the course is practical because classes are held in a classroom equipped with computers (a computer for each student), with internet access and with a whole series of bioinformatics tools installed. Each student must attend all evaluable theoretical-practical sessions of the course having previously read and understood the recommended bibliography.

Learning Outcomes

Specific skills
- Identify the contents and the way of access to the main biological resources and biomolecular databases.
- Know how to use the main bioinformatics tools for the analysis of biomolecular data of both singular genes or proteins and of groups or families of genes and proteins of interest in a study.
- Learn how to interpret and particularize the global (omic) data, present in the main computer servers, for the analysis of genes or proteins.

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

Theoretical-practical lectures:
- Introduction to the Course
- Introduction to R in bioinformatics (https://www.r-project.org/): free software environment and programming language for statistical computing and graphics.

Biological Databases and Resources:.
- Primary databases of sequences (genes and proteins), access and file characteristics: GenBank, RefSeq, EMBL, UniProt.

Bioinformatics and Genomics:
- Genomic and transcriptomic, proteomic large-scale platforms: types of high density microarrays; deep sequencing methods (DNA-seq, RNA-seq, etc); proteomic methods.
- Gene expression analysis: basic concepts and parameters. Analysis of the data provided by different platforms.

Student Seminars:
Each student working in a team with one or two peers (2 maximum) will have to prepare a 30-minute presentation-seminar in which they will explain a useful resource-database or bioinformatic application tool (mainly selected from the special issues of the journal Nucleic Acids Re

Assessment Methods

Assessment
Other: 40.0%
Exam: 60.0%

Bibliography

Será disponibilizada aos alunos durante o Curso / Will be available during the course