Bioinformatics Specialization

Join us in the Top 50 MOOCs of All Time!

How can we sequence and compare genomes How can we determine the genetic basis of disease? How can we create an evolutionary Tree of Life that includes all species of Earth?

This Specialization will teach you how to answer many modern biology questions that are inextricably linked to the computational approaches used to solve them. This Specialization will provide you with a set of software resources that were built using these computational approaches. These software resources are used every day by thousands of biologists in one of the most rapidly growing fields of science.

This Specialization focuses on computational topics but you don't need to be a programmer to complete it. We offer a "Honors Track" for those who are interested in programming (formerly known as the "hacker track"). The Honors Track lets you implement the bioinformatics algorithms you will encounter in dozens of automatically graded programming challenges. You will become a bioinformatics professional by completing the Honors Track!

Watch our introduction video to learn more about the Bioinformatics specialization, including why we are wearing these crazy outfits.

The textbook website has a link to the companion book, Bioinformatics algorithms: An active learning approach.

Class Central named our first course, "Finding Hidden Messages In DNA", as one of the top 50 MOOCs of all time.