Resources for Undergraduate Courses in Bioinformatics

This essay first appeared in the May 2021 issue of Choice (volume 58 | issue 9).

Posted on June 7, 2021 in Bibliographic Essays

Introduction:

Identifying patterns in large data sets is of increasing importance in many fields. The Covid-19 pandemic, in particular, has heightened public awareness of the capacity of large-scale data analysis to inform policy decisions and protect human health. Calculating the fundamental reproductive number of SARS-CoV-2 transmission and tracking its variation over time, for example, can help inform policy decisions about implementing lockdowns.¹ Moreover, availability of reliable information can have an immediate impact on risk behavior², and the availability of viral sequence data is helping track the emergence and spread of new, more contagious variants.³

About the Author:

Diane P. Genereux is a scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She has taught courses in genetics, bioinformatics, and mathematical biology. Her research seeks to discover the genomic and epigenomic basis of cellular tolerance to variable blood glucose and body temperature in diverse mammalian species.

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