BNFO 601: Foundations of Bioinformatics I
Fall 2010

Instructor: Usman Roshan
Office: GITC 3802
Ph: 973-596-2872
Office hours: Tue 3-4:30pm and Wed 12:30-2:30pm
Email: usman@cs.njit.edu

Recommended Textbooks:
Grading: 25% two mid-terms, 35% final exam, 15% three projects

Course Overview: We will cover Perl programming, sequence alignment, and hidden Markov models (HMM). We will implement a pairwise sequence alignment program using dynamic programming and the Viterbi algorithm for HMM sequence alignment. We will also cover genome-wide association studies.

Course plan:

Topic
Date
Remarks
Pairwise sequence alignment
08/31/10
Perl basics and sequence analysis exercises in Perl
09/07/10
Optimal sequence alignment in Perl, affine gaps, and subroutines in Perl
09/14/10
Affine gap sequence alignment, local alignment and BLAST, alignment accuracy 09/21/10
Alignment papers; Review
09/28/10
First mid-term
10/05/10
Perl exercises and more alignment
10/12/10
Hidden Markov models (HMM) for sequence alignment
10/19/10
HMMs for sequence alignment and BLAST exercise
10/26/10
Expected accuracy alignment and review for second exam 11/02/10
Second exam, SNPs, and population structure identification 11/09/10
PCA and k-means
11/16/10
K-means clustering in Perl
11/23/09
Extra credit assignment and review
11/30/09
Final exam
12/14/10