BIO 352 - Genetics and Functional Genomics (4)

Prerequisites: Must have a C- or better in BIO 110 , BIO 111 , and BIO 112 , or permission.

Despite significant scientific advances that make it relatively easy to sequence an organism’s entire genome, making sense of that information is a pressing need in medicine and agriculture. Complex diseases and traits involve many genes interacting with a changing environment over time. They cannot be easily understood using traditional genetic tools, which focus on understanding a single gene or a handful of genes and their functions. Functional genomics seeks to understand how an organism’s complete set of genes contributes to its biological functions and phenotype. Functional genomics encompasses many subdisciplines such as bioinformatics, proteomics and metabolomics, statistical genetics, and systems biology, and it has the potential to help scientists revolutionize human health and agriculture by enabling prediction of phenotypes from genotypes. Students in this course will: describe how genome sequences are determined using DNA sequencing and genetic mapping approaches; review basic concepts of genetics and heritability and apply those concepts on a genome-wide scale, analyze expression of an organism’s entire set of genes at the transcript, protein, and metabolite levels; understand and apply basic statistical approaches to find genetic regions responsible for a complex diseases and traits; and reflect on the ethical implications of this research. Students will explore these areas as they apply to relevant problems in human health and agriculture using fundamental mathematical and genetics concepts in addition to new skills gained in database utilization and computation.