Learn more about how genomic data and computational tools can help us understand and track disease-causing bacteria. Use computational tools to investigate microbial genomes. Applying increasingly powerful computation to genomics contributes to important medical breakthroughs. On this course, you will discover the basic principles of microbial bioinformatics analysis, and comparative genomics.
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Using Artemis, a free genome browser, you will find out how to investigate whole bacterial genomes, and through the analysis of bacterial genes and proteins, you will explore the genomic features of pathogens.
By the end of this course, you will be able to use genomic data to increase your knowledge of microbial genomes.
What topics will you cover?
Week 1
- Multi-FASTA files
- Reference and draft bacterial genomes
- Introduction to Artemis, an open source genome browser
Week 2
- Genome annotation
- Genomic regions defined by GC (guanine-cytosine) content
- Accessing and downloading whole genome sequences
- Pathogenicity islands
Week 3
- Peer-reviewed project: Ecological niche adaptation between two Mycobacterium species
- Pseudogenes in Mycobacterium species
What will you achieve?
By the end of the course, you'll be able to...
- Collect, access, and download whole bacterial genomes from public repositories
- Investigate and navigate bacterial genomes and their annotation using Artemis
- Identify genomic regions with low/high GC (guanine-cytosine) content, often associated with virulence
- Perform simple comparative analyses between bacterial genomes
Who is the course for?
This course would benefit those interested in learning how to use tools to investigate bacterial genomes, and acquire bioinformatics skills to evaluate the role of microbial genes in disease. Using analytical tools to access and probe genomes, learners will find out how to perform comparative analyses of genes and their protein products.
The course will be of interest to undergraduates, post-graduates, researchers, bioinformaticians, microbiologists, and healthcare professionals. The opportunity to use online computational tools to probe bacterial genomes will also be of interest to teachers and their 16-18-year-old science and computing students.
Bacterial Genomes: From DNA to Protein Function using Bioinformatics is a recommended pre-requisite. Scientific terminology is explained.
