Development of Bioinformatics Foundational Courses in Undergraduate Curricula

This paper describes the development of bioinformatics foundational courses for incorporation into undergraduate biology curricula. A sequence of three courses was developed with multi-disciplinary collaboration between the Departments of Biology and Computer Science at Tuskegee University. The focus was on teaching the effective use of bioinformatics tools, as compared to development of bioinformatics tools. The first two courses, Introduction to Bioscience Computing and Biological Algorithms & Data Structures, cover the basic computing and computer science foundation necessary for the informed use of bioinformatics tools. The third is an introductory course in bioinformatics. The courses were designed such that they can be taken by students majoring in biology or computer science. This work was supported by a NSF HBCU-UP grant.