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BIOL.635.01 - Bioinformatics Seminar (BIOL63501.2171)
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BIOL.635.01 - Bioinformatics Seminar (BIOL63501.2171)
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COS-BIOL-635 Bioinformatics Seminar
The course provides opportunities for students and faculty to develop and share professional interests while discussing current trends and developments in bioinformatics. Material for this course will be drawn from the current scientific literature. (Graduate standing in Bioinformatics or permission of instructor) Class 3, Credit 3 (F)
This is a graduate level bioinformatics seminar. This means that each participant will prepare and present lectures on multiple relevant topics in bioinformatics. To help provide focus for your efforts, each of you will pick a major topic to research thoroughly to give you the necessary content for your presentations. While you may do purely a bibliographic research project, you will both learn more and be able to contribute more to the seminar if you select an open research question to which you wish to attempt to contribute new insights.
Each of you will be required to prepare a new presentation each week, with the first presentation to be submitted on Tuesday, 7 September 2017. Each presentation is to be prepared in two forms: as a short paper as a PDF and as set of 15 PowerPoint slides suitable for a 15-minute oral presentation. You will post each paper and each set of slides on an open, public web site. I recommend use of Google Sites. In addition, each of you will maintain an open blog on which you will post links to your papers and sets of slides and discuss your progress on your research. I recommend use of Blogspot.com. The blog, your course web site, the papers and the slides must all be open to public access. Be very careful that you follow appropriate citation standards in preparing all this material. If you are more comfortable merging your web site into your blog, you may do so.
We will try to work out suitable group e-meeting times at which 3-4 of you will be able to do a presentation using screen sharing, and at which we all can discuss research progress. Each student should expect to do oral presentations several times during the semester. For those whose schedules do not permit participation in the group meetings or who have a need for private discussions, you should schedule private e-meetings with me, but one way or another, every student must discuss their progress with me no less often than once every two weeks.
For the end of the course you will prepare a full length paper. This may be created from prior short papers or be something new. In any case you should prepare a well-researched paper as well as a set of 45 PowerPoint slides.
Your minimal learning outcomes, in addition to learning a great deal of bioinformatics content, are: "Critique the primary scientific literature", "Demonstrate the ability to give a quality oral presentation", "Explain the underlying methods used in a given bioinformatics paper".
You should have basic undergraduate preparation in bioinformatics. If you coming to the subject without formal preparation or are rusty, here are two useful texts:
Your best source of material for your seminar presentations is the current bioinformatics literature. You will find the following links useful in doing your research:
You are also welcome to get involved with ongoing bioinformatics research efforts at RIT and elsewhere and to combine your work on that research with your work for this seminar.
At the time Michael Osier proposed this course in 2011, the list of topics was: Genome sequence analysis, Signals in sequences, Gene expression analysis, Ontologies, Data and text mining, Structural bioinformatics, Phylogenetics, Systems biology. These remain appropriate topics. In addition, there is a great deal of current work on the informatics issues in Rational drug design, the "Big-data" implications of bioinformatics and new data acquisition techniques, the Eigenproblems of data mining and hierarchical clustering. You should feel free to explore the literature and suggest other topics.