[Bionews] Bioinformatics for Systems Biology

[Heather Vincent]

Biologists now have at their disposal many methods for the capture of 
data on genes, proteins and other components of the cell. These 
catalogues of parts allow comparisons to be made between organisms, and 
between the same organism in different states.  They also allow 
scientists to add a systems view to the classical approach to biology. 
For example, genetic network analysis can be used to examine the 
regulatory interactions between genes and the proteins derived from them.

Bioinformatics for Systems Biology is a new online course that covers 
the application of graph-based methods to biological data analysis.  The 
content includes data capture, network topology and standards for 
Systems Biology.  It is an interactive course, with practical examples 
drawn from the work of Manchester Centre for Integrative Systems Biology 
(MCISB) and of the Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics group, 
University of Manchester, UK.

The module may be studied on its own, or as an element of the full MSc 
in Bioinformatics.  You will find full details of the MSc programme here 
: http://octette.cs.man.ac.uk/bioinformatics/index.html

The current MSc modules follow two themes, Bioinformatics and Computer 
Science.  The Bioinformatics modules are:

Introduction to Molecular Biology for Computer Scientists
Introduction to Bioinformatics
Bioinformatics for Systems Biology
Introduction to Microarray Data Analysis
Theory and Applications in Bioinformatics
The Bioinformatics of Protein Structure
The Science of Proteomics
Molecular Modelling and Structure-based Drug Design

The computing modules are:

Introduction to software development in Java
Intermediate software development using Java
Biocomputing
Object-oriented analysis and design with UML
Introduction to Ontologies for the Biosciences

If you have any questions, or need advice on the module options, please 
contact Heather.Vincent from manchester.ac.uk