We previously reported that ISU ranked among the top 10 Russian universities by the number of winners in the Vladimir Potanin Foundation’s competition for professors of Master’s degree programmes. Four ISU representatives became winners.

Today we will talk about the project “Modernization of the course on the bioinformatics tools application for the analysis of genomic data” by Ivan Petrushin, Candidate of Technical Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Natural Sciences of the Faculty of Business-Communication and Computer Science.

Ivan Petrushin:

The “Bioinformatics” course is included in the Master’s programme “Data Analysis of Scientific Experiments and Machine Learning” at ISU Institute of Mathematics and Information Technologies. Over the five years of the the programme’s existence, new methods have emerged in the field, artificial intelligence technologies now play a crucial role, so we decided to update it. The project team includes Daria Gutnik, a postgraduate student at the Limnological Institute, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Igor Gorbenko, a graduate of the mentioned Master’s programme, Candidate of Biological Sciences, Junior Researcher at Siberian Institute of Plant Physiology and Biochemistry, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Together, we conduct a number of studies and constantly use bioinformatics tools in our work.

The modernized course is designed to study a wide range of bioinformatics tools and specialized libraries for processing and interpreting genomic data in R and Python programming languages. The main audience for the course is Master’s degree students specializing in “Research Data Analysis and Machine Learning”, but the course modules can be used for training postgraduate students and creating professional development programmes. The field of computational biology and bioinformatics is closely linked to biomedicine, selection, ecology and biotechnology.

Similar courses are almost absent in the programmes of Russian universities. To study the bioinformatics tools, universities usually open specialized Master’s programmes, in which these topics are distributed across several disciplines. Training in such programmes requires knowledge in the subject area (molecular biology and genetics).

The updated course will consist of 6 units containing video materials with lectures and instructions for practical assignments. In this format, the course can be taken offline or online with a lecturer, as well as in self-study mode.