Major in Biotechnology, Concentration in Bioinformatics
The purpose of this interdisciplinary concentration is to prepare students to enter the computer-intensive fields of bioinformatics, computational biology, computational chemistry, and molecular modeling including genomics and proteomics. With the advent of the Human Genome Project, an explosion of genomics information has occurred, and databases such as GenBank and EMBL have grown at a rate that now requires storage, organizing and indexing of the information. Questions of gene expression have led to computational biology, the process of analyzing genomic sequences and to the field of proteomics, the understanding of protein structure and function. The information obtained by computational biology and computational chemistry is used in the design of new drugs to treat a variety of diseases. Major drug and biotechnology companies are seeking people trained in bioinformatics.
In addition to the requirements for the Major in Biotechnology:
BT 378 Bioinformatics* 4
CS 140 Introduction to Programming 4
CS 242 Data Sructures 3
CS 282 UNIX Systems Programming 3
CS 265 Database Applications 3
*counts as an upper division Cellular/Molecular Biology elective.