Bioinformatics

About this course

Join Us in a Top 50 MOOC of All Time! How do we sequence and compare genomes? How do we identify the genetic basis for disease? How do we construct an evolutionary Tree of Life for all species on Earth? When you complete this Specialization, you will learn how to answer many questions in modern biology that have become inseparable from the computational approaches used to solve them. You will also obtain a toolkit of existing software resources built on these computational approaches and that are used by thousands of biologists every day in one of the fastest growing fields in science. Although this Specialization centers on computational topics, you do not need to know how to program in order to complete it. If you are interested in programming, we feature an "Honors Track" (called "hacker track" in previous runs of the course). The Honors Track allows you to implement the bioinformatics algorithms that you will encounter along the way in dozens of automatically graded coding challenges. By completing the Honors Track, you will be a bioinformatics software professional! Learn more about the Bioinformatics Specialization (including why we are wearing these crazy outfits) by watching our introductory video. You can purchase the Specialization's print companion, Bioinformatics Algorithms: An Active Learning Approach, from the textbook website. Our first course, "Finding Hidden Messages in DNA", was named a top-50 MOOC of all time by Class Central!

Course objectives

• understand the role of computational approaches in biology
• gain foundational knowledge in bioinformatics