Certificate Course in Bioinformatics

The Guru Nanak Dev University's Faculty of Life Sciences offers Certificate Course in Bioinformatics to its students. The course structure for it is as follows:

Paper – I Basic Bioinformatics


Definition, History of Bioinformatics, its future scope, Bioinformatics Glossary, Internet and Bioinformatics, World Wide Web, Knowledge Discovery and Data mining.

Sequences Alignment : Introduction, Local and Global Alignment Concepts & Algorithms, Dynamic Programming , Gap penalty, Significance of Alignments, Scoring matrices – PAM & BLOSUM, Statistics of Alignment score.

Sequence Information Sources : Database Searches for homologous sequences : BLAST& FASTA versions. Primary Databases : NCBI, EMBL, GENBANK, ENTREZ. Understanding the structure of each source and using it on the web. Protein Classification Approaches : SCOP, CATH.


Introduction to genes and Proteins : Genome sequences, Protein sequences, Protein structure : secondary, tertiary, quaternary, motifs and domains.
Sequence Formats : Genbank DNA Sequences Entry, FASTA Sequence Entry Format, EMBL Format.

Paper – II Practical

1. To use Bioinformatics tool for sequence alignment : BLAST
2. To explore NCBI database and retrieve a sequence
3. To explore and use EMBL
4. GENBANK
5. ENTREZ
6. Protein classification database : SCOP
7. CATH
8. Protein Databank (PDB)
9. Pubmed in NCBI
10. SWISS-PROT