School of Informatics Postgraduate Prospectus: Bioinformatics Specialism

Bioinformatics Specialism (MSc in Informatics)

News

We currently have M.Sc. studentships on offer for 2006/07 funded by the EPSRC . Please see our MSC prospectus pages for application details.

Overview

The programme features specialist taught modules and project work supervised by research leaders in Bioinformatics, Informatics and Biotechnology. The course introduces the underlying theory and practical design processes used in bioinformatics, and reviews current research. The course includes an introduction to biotechnology for non biological students and a fast track programming and database courses for non IT students.

The Taught Course

This part of the programme runs from September until April and students take a selection of taught modules from a suite of around 50. Of these, two are custom designed for the Specialism in Bioinformatics, a selection of others are suggested and there are a range of further options that are available.

The key modules are Bioinformatics I: Essential Biology and Biological Data Acquisition and Bioinformatics II: Algorithms and Data Analysis. Further details on the core modules is available:
Bioinformatics I , Bioinformatics II

The following modules are recommended to Bioinformatics Students:
Applied Database, Data intensive Linguistics, Data Mining and Exploration, Genetic Algorithms and Genetic programming, Learning from Data I, Learning from Data 2, Neural Computation, Probabilistic Modelling and Reasoning, Visualisation.

All MSc students are required to fulfil a programming requirement which can be based on prior experience or by taking one of the following courses:
AI Programming, AI Programming in JAVA, Programming in JAVA.

Summer Research Project

A significant part of the MSc in Informatics, Bioinformatics Specialism is a full summer research project. These vary considerably in subject matter and are often proposed by students themselves. Examples of projects offered by staff or proposed by students in recent years are:

COBrA: A Concept Ontology Browser for Anatomy
Learning Analogous Patterns in Developmental Anatomy
Visual Exploration of Protein Networks
Gene network/micro-array simulator
BioInformatics : From Sequence to Structure
BioInformatics: Finding Motifs in Sequences
Genes and Geography: Inference from DNA sequences sampled from spatially extended populations
Using Genetic Markers to detect Hybridisation between Species
A Simulation Study of the Effects of Selection on Linked Sequences
Rapid Estimation of Evolutionary Distance
Local Improbability of/in Sequence Alignment
Analysis of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Quality Assurance data
CCS, Petri Nets and Biological Pathways
Biological Text Mining: Extracting positional gene expression information from text
Theme Discovery in Biomedical Records
Integration tool for proteomic and genomic expression data
Identity Soup
Hierarchical Clustering of genes by GO codes
Spreading the (biological) net
A Biology Teaching Tool for Computer Scientists
Investigation of amino acid preferences
Inferring Gene Interactions From Expression Data with Dynamic Bayesian Networks
Evolution of Biological Network Complexity
Gene networks/micro-array simulator using Bayesian method
Predicting Postsynaptic Protein-Protein Interactions from Multiple Data Sources
Flytrap - gene expression database for the fly brain

Acknowledgements and Links

The MSc specialism in Bioinformatics at Edinburgh is supported by the EPSRC.

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