Helping students acquire Bioinformatics skills can be a tedious and time-consuming task, requiring hours of preparation in theoretical and practical aspects of this discipline. Ever-evolving methods, new approaches and hundreds of publications make it a challenge to prepare an engaging curriculum.

Despite the challenges in getting started, it’s obvious that these skills are essential for students in biology, biotechnology and biochemistry majors. Every experiment today comes with data, often times, molecular data. The sheer volume of new data generated and data in public repositories exceeds the ability of current bioinformaticians to make sense of it.

That’s why our team has been working over the past few months with several universities to develop a project-based curriculum for students from various backgrounds interested in bioinformatics. Courses we developed combine basic concepts and practical assignments with a hands-on learning experience for the student using our TBio.Info platform.

The platform allows students to quickly jump into analysis of curated datasets and experience for themselves a bioinformatics workflow – running big data analysis pipelines and applying machine learning methods to extract meaningful insight from data. Our content is designed to teach bioinformatics without any prior exposure to coding, just exposure to science.

The course content can be custom tailored to fit the right level and focus of the students by combining courses and projects into specialization tracks. Here is an example curriculum of a semester long, hybrid online and in-person 8 week long course based on oncology-related projects:

“Bioinformatics is a rapidly growing field that spans the disciplines of biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and computer science to create solutions in medicine, agriculture, and the pharmaceutical industry. Bioinformatics uses high throughput data from genome sequencing and gene expression studies to identify patterns and probe research questions. Students will learn methods to analyze and genomics data and gain hands-on experience with a powerful bioinformatics software platform. Students will complete online training modules using the T-Bio.Info platform and participate in hands-on workshops led by developers from Pine Biotech. This course is open to motivated students who have completed core science classes. Experience with Computer Programming is not required.”

Semester Long Schedule Week Goals Assessment Due Week 1 Meet with Students, Introduction to Course, Platform login setup Read Abstract, Pre Assessment Weeks 2-3 Complete Module: Intro to Bioinformatics. Research Seminar hosted by Dr. Ron Ferrucci, Pine Biotech. Module Quiz Weeks 4-5 Complete Module: Intro to Transcriptomics 1 Module Quiz Weeks 6-7 Complete Module: Transcriptomics 2 Module Quiz Weeks 8-9 Completed Module: Transcriptomics 3 Module Quiz Weeks 10-11 Complete Module: Genomics 1 Module Quiz Weeks 12-13 Complete Module: Metagenomics Module Quiz Weeks 14-16 Hands On Workshop: In Class Pine Biotech: Multi-Omics Integration Final Post Assessment, Final Survey

The course will utilize two prepared datasets: a study of tumor-stroma interaction in a patient-derived xenograft (PDX) model and a cell-line based exome and transcriptome data with machine analysis simulating personalized treatment selection for cancer patients. The platform also provides tracking statistics and students progress that can be viewed by instructors

If you are interested in learning more about custom curriculum development or would like to speak with an advisor, please contact: admin@pine.bio