BIOL 361: Bioinformatics Laboratory

This laboratory course provides a hands-on, inquiry-based, laboratory experience for undergraduate science majors. The laboratory has four major goals: 1) Reinforce and extend the theoretical concepts from the lecture; 2) Connect biological concepts with practical bioinformatics tools and databases; 3) Expose students to computational concepts far more powerful than point-and-click web-based bioinformatics tools; 4) Provide important skills that are widely used in real-world biological and biomedical research. Each week's lab focuses on a particular topic that is closely related to the lecture. After a brief overview by the laboratory instructor, students will run computational bioinformatics experiments and collect the results. After the labs, students will write short lab reports.