This semester, the biology department is offering a new undergraduate course aimed at training both biology and computer science students in the techniques of bioinformatics, a new field that crosses both disciplines. Taught by Ying Tan, a molecular systematist from Yale, BIO 360 teaches students how to use genetic data to address biological questions.

“This class will help students be in a better position in the job market,” says Tan. To work in bioinformatics, a student needs to be able to manipulate large databases and have a strong molecular biology background. Bioinformatics specialists work in universities and drug companies, mining the huge volumes of genetic data as best they can. Their analyses are used to develop to drugs and to better understand how genes work and how species evolved.

This is big shift from traditional genetics research. “When I was a graduate student, we used to spend day and night generating data,” Tan explains. “We had long cycles of experiments that at the end yielded a little precious data.”

With software developed by computational biologists, much drudgery is gone for researchers. “Now analysis is the most important part of our work. Analysis is what we biologists care about most. We can use most of our creativity here. We can be thinking instead of doing,” she says.

The course challenges everyone. The computer science graduate students in the class have a lot of biology to master while the biology students must learn how to retrieve data from the many new genetics databases. But more than anything, the course is about “how to think as a biologist,” Tan says. In her own research, Tan specializes in the molecular evolution of color vision in primates. Her expertise is in the evolutionary analyses of sequence data, a field that’s only about three years old.

The course culminates in a final project in which each student performs a phylogenetic study applying bioinformatics tools such as sequence database searches, sequence alignments, estimating substitution numbers, and phylogenetic reconstruction.

BIO 360 is part of a larger plan to expand UMB’s offerings in computational science. Tan will teach a new graduate course in bioinformatics this summer. In addition, the College of Arts and Sciences is looking to fill a new science professorship with someone who specializes in bioinformatics, ecoinformatics, computational molecular biology, ecosystems modeling, computational physics, or computer engineering.