Izmir Institute of Technology CMS

This course will cover the complex biological molecules and cellular structures and make freshmen students familiar with the underlying concepts of biological processes such as metabolism, inheritance, and cell communication at both molecular and cellular levels.

Objectives            :1.To ensure that students understand the theory and basic principles of biological research and scientific techniques; 2.To enable students to learn the characteristics of important elements in the world of biology and of molecules consisting of a combination of these elements; 3.To ensure that students comprehend the characteristics of the organisms and the structural elements; 4.To ensure that students understand and learn basic knowledge related with the features of organisms, structures and functions; 5.To ensure that students understand and learn the biological events that occur in organisms at the molecular level like DNA replication, protein synthesis, etc.

The course will introduce some of the many tools that are available for analysis of proteins, genes and genomes. The theoretical bases of these tools will be discussed and various programs and algorithms will be demonstrated and applied by the students. Students will learn how to perform database searches; pairwise and multiple sequence alignments and construct phylogenetic trees. Next generation sequencing (NGS) and analysis of NGS will be discussed as well as gene expression methods such as RNA sequencing. Bioinformatic approaches to protein analyses will also be covered.

The course will cover some of the databases available in biology such as NCBI and SwissProt. It will also demystify computational tools like BLAST, FASTA and other search algorithms currently employed in biological research. Finally, many tools which can be employed in projects will be explained in varying detail. Among these are multiple sequence alignment, building of pylogenetic trees, predicting secondary information about genes and proteins. Prediction of sub cellular localization of proteins, gene structure prediction, and discovery of putative functional domains of proteins are among the information that may be predicted.