BIO 318 Virology and Bioinformatics

3 Credit(s)

Virology is the study of microorganisms that penetrate a host cell and commandeer its biosynthetic mechanisms in order to replicate. The most abundant microorganism on Earth, viruses exist that infect every type of cell from microscopic bacteria and protozoans to multicellular plants and animals. Though viral infection ultimately results in the death of the cell, viruses are ancient microorganisms that persist in every ecosystem, and this course will examine specific viral replication cycles as well as the role viruses play in global population dynamics. Bioinformatics is the science of recognizing meaningful patterns within a large pool of biological data using computational tools. Viruses are often identified and studied through examination of the sequence of their genome, which is a large pool of nucleotide data. Bioinformatics computational tools will be used to mine publicly available nucleotide sequence data to understand the biology, evolutionary relationships, diversity, and population dynamics of viruses. Three lecture hours per week.

Prerequisites: BIO 132 Introduction to Cells, or BIO122 World of Cells or BIO105 Biological Systems, and BIO 212 Cell Biology or BIO 217 General Genetics or BIO 219 Evolution or permission of department chairperson.