Bioinformatics Skills

Full course description

Bioinformatics uses computational approaches to manage, analyze and visualize biological data. Especially in the biotechnology field but also in chemical engineering, bioinformatics has a major contribution when considering the advances in e.g. data management, sequencing data analysis, or drug design. In recent years, the complexity of biological systems has gained attention. An entirely new field emerged, Systems Biology, that now drives the development of computational approaches to model and simulate biological systems on different scales.

In this course, you can apply your programming skills from the basic programming course in the first year, and study complex real-world biological systems using different computational techniques. Many of the methodologies are already used in biotechnology when modeling metabolism for increasing microbial potential, modeling plant segregation using Mendel’s law, or simulating population growth. We selected five relevant and commonly used approaches for this skills course. You will realize how versatile and widely applicable many of the methods are so you can apply them in a completely different (even non-biological) setting.

Experts in the particular approaches from the Maastricht Centre for Systems Biology (MaCSBio) and related departments will teach the different sessions.