Biology Major, 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 ever increasing number of fully sequenced genomes, including the human genome, databases such as GenBank and EMBL have grown at such a rate that storing, organizing, indexing, and ultimately mining the data have become key to answering biological questions. 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.
Requirements for a Major in Biology, Concentration in Bioinformatics
| Code | Title | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| Required Biology courses | (38 credits) | |
| BI-140 | Introduction to Organismal Biology | 4 |
| BI-141 | Intro to Cellular and Molecular Biology | 4 |
| BI-200 | Human Biology | 4 |
| BI-202 | Principles of Ecology | 4 |
| BI-203 | Genetics | 4 |
| BI-204 | Microbiology | 4 |
| BI-404 | Biology Seminar | 2 |
| 3 Upper Division Electives (300 or 400 level lab courses) | 12 | |
| Ancillary Requirements | (29 credits) | |
| MA-150 | Statistics I | 3 |
| MA-190 | Pre-calculus (or Higher) | 4 |
| CH-120 & CH-121 | General Chemistry I and General Chemistry II | 8 |
| CH-201 & CH-202 | Organic Chemistry I (lecture) and Organic Chemistry II (lecture) | 6 |
| PY-221 & PY-222 | General Physics I and General Physics II | 8 |
| or PY-241 & PY-242 | Physics I (Mechanics) and Physics II ( Electricity, Magnetism and Optics ) | |
| Concentration in Bioinformatics | (20 credits) | |
| In addition to the requirements for the Major in Biology: | ||
| BT-378 | Bioinformatics 1 | 4 |
| CS-101 | Basics of Computer Science | 3 |
| CS-140 | Introduction to Programming | 4 |
| CS-242 | Data Structures | 3 |
| CS-282 | Unix Systems Programming | 3 |
| CS-265 | Database Applications | 3 |
| Total Credits | 87 | |