BNFO 240: Principles of Bioinformatics I
Spring 2007

Instructor: Usman Roshan
Office: GITC 3802
Ph: 973-596-2872
Office hours: Thursday 12:30-2pm and Friday 11:00-12:30pm
Email: usman@cs.njit.edu

Text: Introduction to Bioinformatics by Arthur M. Lesk
Grading: 50% homework (programming assignments) and 50% exam

Course Overview: We will cover sequence alignment and phylogeny reconstruction supplemented with programming exercises in Perl. Topics covered will include basic molecular biology, Perl programming language basics, pairwise and multiple sequence alignment, exact and heuristic methods, BLAST and FASTA database search, and distance based phylogeny reconstruction. Homework problems will be programming assignments related to these topics.

Course plan:

Topic
Date
Remarks
Introduction
01/17/07
Slides
Perl
01/19/07
Slides
Basic Unix commands
Alignment
01/24/07
Animation for alignment dynamic programming algorithm
Alignment in Perl
01/26/07
Alignment
01/31/07
Alignment in Perl
02/2/07
HW 1
Alignment heuristics
02/7/07
Slides
Alignment in Perl
02/9/07
Class cancelled
02/14/07
Alignment in Perl
02/16/07
BLOSUM 62 matrix
PREFAB pairwise alignments
Comparing two alignments
02/21/07
Comparing two alignments in Perl
02/23/07
HW 2
Comparing two alignments in Perl
02/28/07
Training protein pairwise alignment on PREFAB
03/02/07
Distance-based phylogeny reconstruction
03/07/07
Training pairwise alignment on PREFAB 03/09/07
HW 3
Program to score an alignment
Spring break 03/14/07
Spring break 03/16/07
Distance-based phylogeny reconstruction 03/21/07
Slides
Alignment 03/23/07
Optimal pairwise alignment program in Perl
Gap training
Scoring alignments: Upper case residues only
Phylogeny reconstruction (distance based) 03/28/07
Slides
Alignment 03/30/07
HW 4
SIMPLE substitution matrix
Training and testing datasets
Distance based phylogeny reconstruction 04/04/07
Training alignment parameters 04/06/07
UPGMA in Perl 04/11/07
UPGMA in Perl 04/13/07
NJ 04/18/07
UPGMA in Perl in newick format 04/20/07
HW 5
NJ and UPGMA with branch lengths 04/25/07
Review 04/27/07
UPGMA in Perl
Final exam 05/02/07