Anders Gorm Pedersen,
Molecular Evolution Group, CBS, DTU.
This course will give you a basic introduction to bioinformatics with a focus on the analysis of DNA and protein sequences.
We will cover pairwise alignment (where you will learn about substitution matrices and gap penalties and how to compute an alignment score, and also how a computer finds the best possible alignment), database searching (how does it work and how can the significance of a hit be assessed based on the alignment score), multiple alignment (the need for algorithms that do not guarantee the optimal alignment, what is the best program), and phylogenetic trees (what do they mean, how are they constructed).
The course will take place at the Center for Biological Sequence Analysis, DTU Building 208, auditorium 60 (in the basement), and runs from 9:00 to approximately 16:30 with lunch break from 12:00-13:00. The format is a mixture of talks and mini-exercises (please bring your own laptop to the course). The exercises have been designed to use mostly web-based tools and are therefore platform independent (you can use Windows, Mac, or Linux computers). Please download and install the FigTree tree viewer program for your particular platform.