Introduction to Bioinformatics: Definition – Importance and Uses of Bioinformatics-Information Technology – Systems Biology.
Introduction to Nucleic Acids: DNA and RNA as Genetic Materials – Structure of Nucleic Acids – Nucleosides and Nucleotides – DNA Double Helix. Central Dogma of Molecular Biology – Nature of Genetic Code – Deciphering Genetic Code – Wobble Hypothesis – Universalities and Exceptions. Applications of Data Mining to Bioinformatics Problems – Biological Data – Databases -Protein Sequencing – Nucleic Acid Sequencing – Sequence to Structure Relationship.
Bioinformatics Software: Clustal V – Clustal W 1.7 – RasMol – Oligo – Molscript – Treeview – Alscript – Genetic Analysis Software- Phylip.
Biocomputing: Introduction to String Matching Algorithms – Database Search Techniques -Sequence Comparison and Alignment Techniques – Use of Biochemical Scoring Matrices –Introduction to Graph Matching Algorithms – Automated Genome Comparison and its Implication – Automated Gene Prediction – Automated Identification of Bacterial Operons and Pathways – Introduction to Signaling Pathways and Pathway Regulation. Gene Arrays – Analysis of Gene Arrays – Machine Learning Methods in Bioinformatics – Hidden Markov models – Applications of HMM in gene identification and Profiles HMMs – Neural Networks and Support Vector machines.