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MSc Health Data Science

Year of entry: 2025

Course unit details:
Principles of Digital Biology

Course unit fact file
Unit code COMP60532
Credit rating 15
Unit level FHEQ level 7 – master's degree or fourth year of an integrated master's degree
Teaching period(s) Semester 2
Available as a free choice unit? Yes

Overview

Biology is currently undergoing a revolution. The success of the human genome project and other high-throughput technologies is creating a flood of new data. Capturing, interpreting and analysing this data provides real and significant challenges for computer scientists. This course will use biology as an exciting application domain for a wide range of CS techniques that have been developed on the course.

Pre/co-requisites

Pre-requisites

A knowledge of modern biology is not a course prerequisite.

Learning outcomes

  • A basic understanding of the computational needs of modern biology.

  • Develop an understanding of the problems inherent in communicating with scientists from a different discipline.

  • Develop the ability to reflect upon and synthesize a range of computational techniques to develop effective problem solving strategies in an unfamiliar problem domain.

  • Develop the ability to communicate these strategies to non-specialists.

Syllabus

  • Intro to Biology
  • Intro to Biology - the central dogma (2 hours)
  • Intro to genomics (2 hours)
  • Biology databases (2 hours)
  • Data capture
  • Capturing microarray data (1 hour)
  • Proteomics seminar (1 hour)
  • The gene ontology (1 hour)
  • Resource meta-data (1 hour)
  • Data delivery
  • HCI and bioinformatics (2 hours)
  • Dealing with heterogeneous, distributed data. (2 hours)
  • Bioinformatics and the grid (2 hours)
  • Data analysis
  • Integrated approaches to post-genome data (2 hours)

Teaching and learning methods

Lectures

1 day per week (5 weeks)

Employability skills

Analytical skills
Group/team working
Innovation/creativity
Leadership
Project management
Oral communication
Problem solving
Research
Written communication

Assessment methods

Method Weight
Written assignment (inc essay) 100%

Feedback methods

Students work on a group based project exploring the application of computer science to an industrially focussed digital biology problem. Every day each group reports back to the class on the work they have completed. Tutors provide detailed formative feedback after each of these presentations. The final assessment is an individual report based on the group work. Detailed individual feedback will be provided on short report plans before the final report is completed.

Study hours

Scheduled activity hours
Lectures 35
Independent study hours
Independent study 115

Teaching staff

Staff member Role
Duncan Hull Unit coordinator

Additional notes

Links related to COMP60532

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