Master in Bioinformatics for Health Sciences

Concepts: Software engineering and assessment; elements of bioethics, data protection and intellectual property rights; projects management, bioinformatics publishing and good practices in biomedical research. Design of a research protocol.

Capacities and skills: To provide the student with the tools to design, manage and exploit research projects from an enterpreneurship perspective.

Concepts: Fundamentals of responsible conduct of research and components of good scientific practices. Knowledge of the structure and dynamics of science-technology-innovation system and their indicators and evaluation methods.

Capacities and skills: The student will be trained in the critical thinking methodology. Good scientific practices will be deployed on case analysis. Likewise it will be discussions on present science policy and bioethics topics.

Concepts: To acquire criteria for organization and presentation of relevant information.

Capacities and skills:To elaborate working hypothesis from bibliographic sources of data. Planning of milestones and expected results during the development of a research project.

Concepts: To know the organization and functioning of the research laboratory. To apply concepts and techniques acquired during the master in research. The master project will be evaluated by a written report and a public defense of the project and results.

Capacities and skills: To design and perform bioinformatic research in an industrial, academic or clinical environment. Planning and use of adequate tools. Use of decision elements in specific situations. Learn basic elements of communication. Learn the ethical principles in the work environment. Learn the principles governing teamwork.

Concepts: Concept and implementation of classical simulation methods: molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo. Introduction to statistical mechanics. Potential energy surface and free energy concepts.

Capacities and skills: The classical molecular simulation techniques will be explained and the student will have the opportunity to apply the concepts in small practical programming projects. Afterwards, the techniques will be applied to real cases of molecular simulation, emphasizing typical problems like protein folding, protein-ligand interactions or enzymatic reactivity.

Concepts: Major aspects of the molecular pathology of diseases that have a great impact in our social and health environment: cancer, inflammatory, cardiovascular and neuropsiquiatric diseases. In their context, relevant processes, mechanisms and paradigms will be studied.

Capacities and skills:The student will develop skills in acquisition, critical processing, and communication of scientific information, and proposal and discussion of hypothesis. The student will also exercise the ability to integrate knowledge from different disciplines.

Concepts: Knowledge of principles and types of fundamental mechanisms in the response of eukaryotic cells to stress. Knowledge of processes, signalling pathways and major mediators in the detection of an adaptation of cells to stress.

Capacities and skills: The student will develop skills in acquisition, critical processing, and communication of scientific information, and proposal and discussion of hypothesis. The student will also exercise the ability to integrate knowledge from different disciplines.

Concepts: An introduction to Python, with an special focus on object-oriented programming and the use of libraries developed in bioinformatics open source projects.

Capacities and skills: To strength fundamental concepts in algorithmics and their practical implementation in an object oriented language.

Concepts: An introduction to algorithmics. Hands on working in linux/unix environment. The common and basic algorithms for programming are reviewed and implemented in BASH.

Capacities and skills: Basic programming skills such as the understanding of coding loops and branches will be gained, as well as a basic but sound knowledge of working under linux/unix operating system, which is necessary in order to program and develop algorithm in any language.

Concepts: Identification and understanding of the problems that can be tackled by computational approaches in a biomedical research project.

Capacities and skills: Acquisition of concepts and skills to find data and information over the public biomedical databases, the execution of basic operations related to the computational analysis of sequences, basic principles on high throughput experiments and data analysis (e.g. microarray data analysis), functional annotation of sequences, and basic concepts in system biology (e.g. mapping of genes and proteins to interaction networks). Mainly a practical course, with hands-on exercises using publicly available resources on real data. In addition, the students will conduct throughout the course an exercise around a real case problem in the biomedical area. The audience of the course are students interested in learning how to use basic bioinformatic software as users, and is not aimed at learning how to develop such tools.

Concepts: Introduction to state of the art tools on bioinformatics and translational bioinformatics.

Capacities and skills: To learn how to use in a rational way last generation tools.

Concepts: The scope of this course is to analyse in depth the applicability of different model organisms (yeast, C. elegans, Drosophila, zebrafish, mouse) to human physiopathology.

Capacities and skills: Applications of modified organisms to biotechnology and biomedicine as emergent developments in gene therapy and regenerative medicine will be discussed.

Concepts: Evolution of genes and genomes. A theoretical analysis of genome complexity. The Human Genome Project, implications for Medicine and Biology. Mutational mechanisms for genes and genomes. Medical Genetics and genetic counseling. Diagnosis and treatment of genetic disease.

Capacities and skills: An evolutionary vision to biology and genetics. Applications to pharmacology, structural biology, cancer and metabolism.

Concepts: Molecular mechanisms in the interaction between cells and environment. Cell membranes, ion channels and membrane receptors utilize complex signaling pathways to control patterns of gene expression. Pathological perturbation of cellular communication leads to cell and organism dysfunction.

Capacities and skills: Pharmacological and genetic modulation of signaling pathways and cell function.

Concepts: Fundamental processes occurring in cells and organisms. Basic mechanisms of gene expression, from chromatin regulation to protein synthesis and stability.

Capacities and skills: To acquire the ability to choose the types of methodologies for the study of cellular processes at the molecular level.

Concepts: Introduction to the basic principles of genetics, cell biology, molecular biology and main physiological processes. For the students with little background in biology the course will cover the structural components of the cells, basic principles of cellular function: transport, metabolism, signalling, reproduction, and the main molecules that mediate these processes.

Capacities and Skills: The student will get familiarized with the language and specialized terms used in biology and biomedical sciences, as well as with the common methologies used in biomedicine.