Entry requirements

Completed courses of 150 credits including (1) 60 credits in biology and 30 credits in chemistry or 30 credits in earth science, or (2) 90 credits in biology. In both cases including either Fundamental and Molecular Systematics 10 credits or the two courses Evolutionary Processes 15 credits and participation in Evolutionary Patterns 15 credits. Proficiency in English equivalent to the Swedish upper secondary course English 6.

Learning outcomes

The course intends to give the student a set tool (in the form of Perl, relation databases and R) to handle, store, structure, analyse and visualise data in a molecular-systematic project.

On completion of the course, the student should be able to:

• choose and apply existing applications in Perl, relation databases and R
• design simple relation databases
• write new or modify existing code (in Perl, SQL and R) to solve simple problems
• outline solutions to information flow based on Perl, R and SQL for a systematic research project

Content

The course presents and applies the most popular open environments in bioinformatics to design practical solutions to concrete problems within the systematics.

- Automation of bioinformatic data management; application of bioinformatics, from process to algorithm, to solve problems through programming.

- Biological relation databases; common database types, design of relational databases, data management with SQL.

- Automation with Perl; basic syntax and logic, references, subroutines and modules, regular expressions, file management, Perl DBI.

- Numerical data analysis with R; data structures, import of data, visualisation, program packages in R, interface with databases.

- Programming for the web; Apache web server, HTML, Perl programming for the web and CSS.

Instruction

The teaching is given in the form of e-teaching

Assessment

Course parts: Theory 2 credits, Lab practicals 3 credits

The theory part is examined through active participation in web seminars and web fora. The lab practicals are examiend through assignments.

If there are special reasons for doing so, an examiner may make an exception from the method of assessment indicated and allow a student to be assessed by another method. An example of special reasons might be a certificate regarding special pedagogical support from the disability coordinator of the university.