Coursera

Hacking COVID-19 — Course 2: Decoding SARS-CoV-2's Secrets (Coursera)

Offered by University of California, San Diego,

In this course, you will follow in the footsteps of the bioinformaticians investigating the COVID-19 outbreak by annotating the SARS-CoV-2 genome and using the annotation to design a COVID-19 diagnostic test. Whether you’re new to the world of computational biology, or you’re a bioinformatics expert seeking to learn about its applications in the COVID-19 pandemic, or somewhere in between, this course is for you!

Class Deals by MOOC List - Click here and see Coursera's Active Discounts, Deals, and Promo Codes.

As you go through this journey, we will introduce and explain genomic concepts and give you many opportunities to practice your skills, and we will provide a series of problems with gradually increasing complexity. This second course will only discuss the annotation of the SARS-CoV-2 genome, but future courses in this series will explore follow-up bioinformatics analyses used in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Syllabus

WEEK 1
In Chapter 3, we will explore how to use bioinformatics to aid in rapidly diagnosing patients who may be infected with COVID-19. Much like how laboratories around the world have been hard at work developing methods to test for COVID-19, we will now try to design our own diagnostic test.

WEEK 2
In Chapter 4, we will use the SARS-CoV-2 genome annotation to design our own COVID-19 diagnostic test and will learn how to measure its accuracy.

Go to Class

MOOC List is learner-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Related Courses

Coursera

University of California, San Diego,Higher School of Economics - HSE University

Genome Assembly Programming Challenge (Coursera)

CS: Software Engineering CS: Theory

In Spring 2011, thousands of people in Germany were hospitalized with a deadly disease that started as food poisoning with bloody diarrhea and often led to kidney failure. It was the beginning of the deadliest outbreak in recent history, caused by a mysterious bacterial strain that we will refer to as E. coli X. Soon, German officials linked the outbreak to a restaurant in Lübeck, where nearly 20% of the patrons had developed bloody diarrhea in a single week. At this point, biologists knew that they were facing a previously unknown pathogen and that traditional methods would not suffice – computational biologists would be needed to assemble and analyze the genome of the newly emerged pathogen.

Sep 21st 2026

3 Weeks

Programming Algorithms Data Structures

Coursera

American Museum of Natural History

Virology and Epidemiology in the Time of COVID-19 (Coursera)

Health & Society Science

This course covers the science and social impacts of viral infectious diseases. We will begin by covering the basics: what a virus is, the structural and functional diversity of viruses, and how viruses use our bodies and the bodies of other organisms to replicate. Then we will dive into the human response: how our immune systems work to protect us from pathogenic viruses and how we use science and social systems to fend off viruses through vaccines and public health measures.

Oct 12th 2026

5-12 Weeks

Virology Epidemiology Virus

Coursera

University of California, San Diego

Genome Sequencing (Bioinformatics II) (Coursera)

Sci: Biology & Life Sciences Health & Society

You may have heard a lot about genome sequencing and its potential to usher in an era of personalized medicine, but what does it mean to sequence a genome? Biologists still cannot read the nucleotides of an entire genome as you would read a book from beginning to end. However, they can read short pieces of DNA. In this course, we will see how graph theory can be used to assemble genomes from these short pieces. We will further learn about brute force algorithms and apply them to sequencing mini-proteins called antibiotics.

Oct 12th 2026

5-12 Weeks

DNA Genomes Antibiotics

Coursera

Johns Hopkins University

Bioconductor for Genomic Data Science (Coursera)

Statistics & Data Analysis Data Science

Learn to use tools from the Bioconductor project to perform analysis of genomic data. This is the fifth course in the Genomic Big Data Specialization from Johns Hopkins University.

Oct 12th 2026

4 Weeks

Bioinformatics Data Analysis Data Science

Coursera

University of California, San Diego

Finding Mutations in DNA and Proteins (Bioinformatics VI) (Coursera)

Sci: Biology & Life Sciences Computer Science

In previous courses in the Specialization, we have discussed how to sequence and compare genomes. This course will cover advanced topics in finding mutations lurking within DNA and proteins. In the first half of the course, we would like to ask how an individual's genome differs from the "reference genome" of the species.

Oct 12th 2026

5-12 Weeks

DNA Bioinformatics Proteins

Coursera

Johns Hopkins University

Python for Genomic Data Science (Coursera)

Statistics & Data Analysis Data Science

This class provides an introduction to the Python programming language and the iPython notebook. This is the third course in the Genomic Big Data Science Specialization from Johns Hopkins University.

Oct 12th 2026

4 Weeks

Programming Python Big Data

Coursera

University of Barcelona

Manejo del enfermo semicrítico y crítico por COVID-19 (Coursera)

Health & Society

Después de realizar este curso serás capaz de conocer los elementos clave del abordaje del paciente crítico y semicrítico por COVID-19, basados en la evidencia científica disponible y que puedan ayudarte en la toma de decisiones clínicas. Curso dirigido a los profesionales de medicina y enfermería, con conocimientos básicos en la atención a pacientes críticos y, que debido a la crisis sanitaria, atienden en las áreas de críticos o semicríticos COVID-19 y/o a estos pacientes fuera de su ubicación habitual.

Oct 5th 2026

5-12 Weeks

Pharmacology Nursing Care Patient Care

Coursera

University of California, San Diego

Genomic Data Science and Clustering (Bioinformatics V) (Coursera)

Sci: Biology & Life Sciences Health & Society

How do we infer which genes orchestrate various processes in the cell? How did humans migrate out of Africa and spread around the world? In this class, we will see that these two seemingly different questions can be addressed using similar algorithmic and machine learning techniques arising from the general problem of dividing data points into distinct clusters.

Sep 21st 2026

3 Weeks

Clustering Bioinformatics Data Science

Coursera

Politecnico di Milano

Reaching Vulnerable Groups through Pandemic Policy (Coursera)

Social Sciences

This course aims to provide an in-depth reflection on social work in different contexts, hereby focusing on their needs, the way the contexts have been influenced, and different challenges that have occurred during the last two years.

Sep 28th 2026

5-12 Weeks

Vulnerability Social Work Pandemics

Coursera

Imperial College London

Introduction to Participatory Approaches in Public Health (Coursera)

Health & Society

This course will introduce you to participatory approaches to public health. You will learn about the history of participatory health research and why it is essential to solving contemporary public health challenges. The course will help you to understand the social and cultural context of public health, before introducing you to essential concepts for working with communities: knowledge and power. Finally, you will engage with critical analyses of participatory approaches, to help you to determine if and when such strategies are appropriate.

Sep 28th 2026

4 Weeks

Health HIV Knowledge

Coursera

Institute for the Future

Life After COVID-19: Get Ready for our Post-Pandemic Future (Coursera)

Business

The pandemic will create long-lasting and surprising ripple effects, even after vaccines are widely available. Are you ready for what's next? This course will give you a clear forecast of the challenges and opportunities you’re most likely to encounter over the next 3-5 years, as a direct result of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Find out what risks still lie ahead; Make a plan for resilience; Play future forecasting games to stretch your imagination about what's possible; Build your post-pandemic confidence; Envision the world you want to live in when we’re all finally on the other side of COVID-19. How can you take advantage of this unprecedented moment of disruption to make positive change in your community, company or other organization?

Sep 28th 2026

4 Weeks

Resilience Pandemics Positive Change

Coursera

Dartmouth College

Reflections from 40 Years Fighting International Epidemics (Coursera)

Health & Society

Reflections on patients, policies, pan-epidemics, prose and medical humanities from a 40-year career fighting epidemics around the world by an infectious disease public health physician. Examples include HIV/AIDS, Anthrax, SARS, MERS, H5N1 and H1N1 influenza, Nipah, Ebola (with MSF 2014), Zika, Plague (with WHO 2017) and COVID-19. Working side-by-side with international colleagues to provide hands-on patient care and to share stories is an expression of medical humanities.

Sep 28th 2026

5-12 Weeks

Epidemiology Epidemics HIV/AIDS