BIOS 477/877 Bioinformatics and Molecular Evolution (3 credits)


  HOME Schedule Links MYUNL Moriyama Lab

[Last updated: April 23, 2025]

 

Course Schedule (will be updated constantly)

NOTE — Homework assignments and due dates shown are based on the past schedule. Will be adjusted depending on how we go.

LectureDateTopicsReading*HW**Due***
1Jan 21 T
  • Introduction to bioinformatics (handout)
(Introduction to Bioinformatics by Xiong; available on Canvas) Survey Jan 24
2Jan 23 R
  • Introduction to internet resources: databases and web tools (handout)
(Ch3)
NCBI Help
PubMed Help
Entrez Help
1 Jan 30
3Jan 28 T
  • Fundamentals of Molecular Evolution (handout)
Ch4:pp71-76
Ch7:pp238-248
Molecular Evolution Reading (available on Canvas)
4Jan 30 R
  • Molecular Evolution, Part 2 (handout)
2 Feb 6
5Feb 4 T
  • Molecular Evolution, Part 3 (handout)
6Feb 6 R
  • Pairwise alignment (dotplot, dynamic programming algorithm) (handout)
Ch4:pp77-89
Ch5:pp126-139
3 Feb 9
7Feb 11 T
  • Pairwise alignment (more dynamic programming algorithm, local alignment) (handout)
G1 Mar 9
8Feb 13 R
  • Pairwise alignment (gap penalty function)
  • Introduction to substitution matrices (handout)
Ch5:pp115-126 4 Feb 20
9Feb 18 T
  • Amino acid substitution matrices (PAM & BLOSUM) (handout)
  
10Feb 20 R
  • Amino acid substitution matrices (Information theory)
  • Statistical significance of alignment scores (handout)
Ch5:pp153-1555 Feb 27
11Feb 25 T
  • Statistical significance of alignment scores
  • Similarity search (handout)
Ch4:pp93-103
Ch5:pp139-152
NCBI BLAST Help
NCBI BLAST Statistics
   
12Feb 27 R
  • Similarity search (FASTA, BLAST) (handout)
6 Mar 6
13Mar 4 T
  • Similarity search (BLAST & FASTA statistics) (handout)
  
14Mar 6 R
  • Similarity search (BLAST & FASTA statistics)
  • Multiple Alignment - Part 1 (Introduction, Clustal W) (handout)
Ch4:pp90-93
Ch6:196-211
7 Mar 13
15Mar 11 T
  • Multiple Alignment - Part 2 (T-Coffee, MAFFT, etc.) (handout)
Ch4:pp90-93
Ch6:196-211
16Mar 13 R
  • Multiple Alignment - Part 3 (ClustalO, PRANK, etc.)
  • Alignment filtering and benchmarking (handout)
Ch4:pp103-113
Ch6:pp165-178, 211-220
8 Apr 3
Mar 17 - 21 Spring break    
17Mar 25 T
  • Domain, motif, profile
  • PSI-BLAST (handout)
 
18Mar 27 R
  • Hidden Markov models
  • Profile hidden Markov models
  • Protein family/domain databases (InterPro, etc.) (handout)
Ch6:pp179-196 G2 May 11
19Apr 1 T
  • Other protein family/domain databases and searches (HHblits, etc.)
  • Distance estimation - for nucleotide and protein sequences (handout)
Ch7:pp235-238, 251-255
Ch8:pp267-276
20Apr 3 R
  • Distance estimation (assumptions, gamma distances, synonymous and nonsynonymous substitutions)
  • Phylogenetic methods - Introduction (handout)
9 Apr 10
21Apr 8 T
  • Phylogenetic methods - Rooting, Distance based (UPGMA, FM, ME, NJ) (handout)
Ch7:pp223-235, 248-251
Ch8:pp276-313
  
22Apr 10 R
  • Phylogenetic methods (Character based: MP and ML)
  • Tree searching (Exhaustive, branch-and-bound) (handout)
10 Apr 17
23Apr 15 T
  • Tree searching (Heuristic)
  • Bootstrap analysis (handout)
  
24Apr 17 R
  • Phylogenetic methods/programs (PhyML, etc.)
  • Visualization of phylogeny (handout)
(11) optional May 1
25Apr 22 T
  • Protein structure databases (PDB, SCOP, CATH)
  • Protein secondary structure prediction (handout)
(Ch2)
Ch14:pp567-580
Ch11, Ch12
26Apr 24 R
  • Protein secondary structure prediction
  • Transmembrane region prediction (handout)
12 May 9
27Apr 29 T
  • Protein structure prediction (strategies)
  • Protein structure prediction (FUGUE, Phyre2, etc.) (handout)
(Ch13:pp529-537)    
28May 1 R
  • Gene prediction methods (handout)
Ch9
Ch10
   
29May 6 T
  • Gene prediction methods (ab initio methods, GENSCAN, etc.) (handout)
   
30May 8 R
  • Gene prediction, genome annotation, etc. (handout)
   
May 12 - May 16 Final week  

* Recommended readings from Understanding Bioinformatics chapters. Related readings are listed in parentheses. "Printed material" will be distributed at the class or through Blackboard. Chapters 4, 7, 9, 11, 13, and 14 (shown in italics in the schedule) in Understanding Bioinformatics are Applications Chapters. These chapters are suggested to be read before Theory Chapters.
** Homework assignments are availalble from Canvas. G1, G2, ... are Graduate Only assignments. Assignment 11 is optional.
*** Each assignment is due at 11:59 pm on the specified date.