Bioinformatics at University of Birmingham at Edgbaston

Designed to prepare students to interact with the world’s most advanced biological and clinical datasets - this programme will prepare students for careers, or further graduate work, in the omics-enabled biosciences.

The future of biology is bioinformatics – computational analysis procedures that leverage state-of-the-art statistics and machine learning to gain insight into systems of exquisite complexity. Humans have entered an era of unprecedented expansion in the biological sciences, and data now grows exponentially faster than Moore’s law.

The biological sciences have been transformed by the advent of omics. Enabled by revolutionary advances in molecular sequencing and mass spectrometry, it is now possible to sequence a genome in six hours, simultaneously assess the expression level of every gene in a genome, quantify the abundance of proteins and metabolites, and determine the epigenetic and regulatory landscape of individual cells. Hypotheses are generated through the integrative analysis of enormous datasets, and tested in high-throughput with third-generation genome-engineering technologies, including CRISPR.

Biology is now driven by data.

This course is composed of five taught modules, one group project, and one independent project. The taught modules provide students with foundational knowledge and skills in statistics, computer programming, and molecular biology, and then exploit this skillset to help students to understand and participate in the ongoing revolution in biological data science.

The course begins with a fast-paced introduction to essential capabilities. Through individualised and student-centered teaching, as well as heterogeneous group work, it will prepare wet-bench biologists and clinicians interested in data analysis, as well as statisticians or computer scientists wishing to work in biology for studies in modern bioinformatics.

Students will then be introduced to the sequencing modalities that have reduced the cost of obtaining the human genome from over a billion pounds to less than a thousand dollars, and the many applications in the biomedical and environmental sciences enabled by these technologies. Beyond DNA and RNA sequencing, students will learn how mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy have opened protein sequencing and metabolomics – the study of all small molecules, or metabolites present in a system. Students will learn how to integrate these datatypes with high-content imaging to map molecular changes onto four-dimensional representations of complex systems, including the human nervous system and fresh-water ecologies.

Closely supervised individual projects will prepare students to tackle real-world research or industrial problems at scale, and highly interactive group projects will enable teams to tackle challenges too complex for individuals. Projects are developed in collaborations with the University of Birmingham's world-leading faculty and the many industrial partners in the West Midlands, ensuring that students are equally prepared for academic or industrial career paths.