Lecture 1

Introduction

Aims

• To place bioinformatics in a wider context.

Objectives

After this lecture you will be able to:

• describe the general transfer of biological sequential information within the cell.
• discuss a range of experimental methods, the kinds of data that these generate, and examples of biological questions that these can help to address.

Supplementary Material

Some of the lecture slides are available on-line (1 per page, 4 per page).

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's DNA Learning Center has produced a series of short videos on the Central Dogma of Biology.

The Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB) has produced an introductory video: "What is a Protein?"

Some experimental methods were mentioned briefly in the lecture. If you want to know more about these methods, the following Wikipedia pages are a good starting point:

• DNA sequencing
• Protein sequencing
• X-ray crystallography
• Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy
• Cryo-electron microscopy
• Small-angle X-ray scattering
• DNA microarray
• RNA-Seq
• Two-dimensional gel electrophoresis
• Mass spectrometry
• In situ hybridization