At the University of Waterloo, courses in bioinformatics are offered by both the Department of Biology in the Faculty of Science and the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science in the Faculty of Mathemetics. 

Undergraduate courses

The Bioinformatics option within the Faculty of Science

  • BIOL 266 — Introduction to Computational Biology
    This course provides an introduction to computational methods in biology, including exploration of bioinformatics databases and tools, analysis of protein and DNA sequences, and computer-aided modelling of biological systems. Labs will include practical experience applying computational tools to biological problems.
  • BIOL 365 — Methods in Bioinformatics
    This course covers bioinformatics methods with an emphasis on analysis of high-throughput ‘-omics’ data. Topics include analysis of genome-scale gene and protein expression, construction of species and gene trees from molecular sequence data, and analysis of biological systems using bioinformatics tools. Included will be practical experience with bioinformatics tools and datasets.
  • BIOL 465 — Structural Bioinformatics
    Functional and structural analysis of proteins using bioinformatics tools. Topics include protein structure visualization, structure comparison and prediction, prediction of protein function and interactions, molecular dynamics, and protein design.
  • BIOL 469 — Genomics
    An applied course on the computational exploration of genomes. Topics include comparative and evolutionary genomics, metagenomics, and genomics applications in health and medicine. The lab will involve analysis of genomic datasets using scripting and bioinformatic software.
  • CS 482 — Computational Techniques in Biological Sequence Analysis
    Computer science principles and algorithms in biological sequence analysis. Topics include algorithms for sequence comparison, for large-scale database search in biological databases, for evolutionary tree reconstruction, for identifying important features in DNA and RNA sequences, for protein sequence identification and underlying computational techniques.

Graduate courses

  • BIOL 614 — Bioinformatics Tools and Techniques
    The thoretical basis of various bioinformation tools will be presented and discussed, and applied to research tasks within the laboratory component of the course. Topics may include advanced BLAST searching, multiple sequence alignments, sequence logos, expression databases, functional annotation of proteins, structural visualization, and comparative structural modelling.
  • CS 882 — Advanced Topics in Bioinformatics