Programming in the Life Sciences

Full course description

In the life sciences the physical interactions between chemical and biological entities, like genes, RNA, proteins, metabolites, and drugs, is of key interest to human health. Not only do these interactions play an important role in the regulation of gene expression, inhibition of proteins, and they basically define all cellular processes and therefore life itself. For example, pharmacology studies the action of drugs on protein, metabolism depends on the interactions of small molecule substrates with enzymes, and coronaviruses reorganise the normal function of cells after entry into the cell.

With the increasing amount of knowledge and data in the life sciences, automation becomes

increasingly important. The data, whether large or small and complex, have challenges to integrate data from different experiments and data sources. Many core life sciences databases, such as WikiData have made their data available in RDF (resource data framework), and provide SPARQL endpoints to their knowledge. In this course, you will learn to use how to interact with SPARQL endpoints with JavaScript and visualise the results graphically with a library like d3.js. Additionally, you will learn to store and share your code through Github.