Welcome to “Bioinformatics: Introduction and Methods! Upon completion of this module you will be able to: become familiar with the essential concepts of bioinformatics; explore the history of this young area; experience how rapidly bioinformatics is growing. Our supplementary materials will give you a better understanding of the course lectures through they are not required in quizzes or exams

Upon completion of this module, you will be able to: describe dynamic programming based sequence alignment algorithms; differentiate between the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm for global alignment and the Smith-Waterman algorithm for local alignment; examine the principles behind gap penalty and time complexity calculation which is crucial for you to apply current bioinformatic tools in your research; experience the discovery of Smith-Waterman algorithm with Dr. Michael Waterman himself.

Upon completion of this module, you will be able to: become familiar with sequence databse search and most common databases; explore the algoritm behind BLAST and the evaluation of BLAST results; ajdust BLAST parameters base on your own research project.

Upon completion of this module, you will be able to: recognize state transitions, Markov chain and Markov models; create a hidden Markov model by yourself; make predictuions in a real biological problem with hidden Markov model.

Upon completion of this module, you will be able to: describe the features of NGS; associate NGS results you get with the methods for reads mapping and models for variant calling; examine pipelines in NGS data analysis; experience how real NGS data were analyzed using bioinformatic tools. This module is required before entering Module 8.

Upon completion of this module you will able to: describe what is variant prediction and how to carry out variant predictions; associate variant databases with your own research projects after you get a list of variants; recognize different principles behind prediction tools and know how to use tools such as SIFT, Polyphen and SAPRED according to your won scientific problem.

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Upon completion of this module, you will be able to: describe how transcriptome data were generated; master the algorithm used in transcriptome analysis; explore how the RNA-seq data were analyzed. This module is required before entering Module 9.

Upon completion of this module, you will be able to: Analyze non-coding RNAs from transcriptome data; identify long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) from NGS data and predict their functions.

Upon completion of this module, you will be able to: define ontology and gene ontology, explore KEGG pathway databses; examine annotations in Gene Ontology; identify pathways with KOBAS and apply the pipeline to drug addition study.

Upon completion of this module, you will be able to describe the most important bioinformatic resources including databases and software tools; explore both centralized resources such as NCBI, EBI, UCSC genome browser and lots of individual resources; associate all your bioinformatic problems with certain resources to refer to.

Upon completion of this case study module, you will be able to: experience how to apply bioinformatic data, methods and analyses to study an important problem in evolutionary biology; examine how to detect and study the origination, evolution and function of species-specific new genes; create phylogenetic trees with your own data (not required) with Dr. Manyuan Long, a world-renowned pioneer and expert on new genes from University of Chicago.

Upon completion of this case study module, you will be able to: experience how to use bioinformatic methods to study the function and evolution of DNA methylases; share with Dr. Gang Pei, president of Tongji University and member of the Chinese Academy of Science, the experiences in scientific research and thought about MOOC.