Bioinformatics is viewed here as an interdisciplinary field that greatly benefits from

collaborators coming from disparate backgrounds. This short course will use a problem-solving, collaborative approach to analyze molecular and genomic data in several different ways. Bioinformatics is being applied to solve current microbiological problems in areas such as medicine, agriculture, conservation, and evolution. The relationships between evolutionary theory and the analysis of microbial genomes, molecular sequence and structural data will be emphasized.

The course's focus will be on learning about the causal bases for bioinformatics analyses along with a philosophy of education: problem posing, problem-solving, and peer review/publication (BioQUEST's 3 P's).

The short course serves several purposes:

• As a learning resource for faculty in microbiology who are interested in developing their understanding of the microbiological (as compared to the computational or mathematical) aspects of bioinformatics analyses;
• As a forum for undergraduate teachers of bioinformatics to collaborate in the development of microbiology or bioinformatics courses and/or curricula;
• As an opportunity to integrate mathematics into the undergraduate microbiology curriculum;
• As a chance to develop a better idea of what questions microbiologists have with respect to teaching and learning elements of bioinformatics; and
• As an opportunity for developing undergraduate research programs in bioinformatics.

The sessions deal with medical microbiology, virology, cell biology, and microbial ecology examples.

For more information, please contact Sue Risseeuw ( 608-363-2012 )

The lectures relate to:

1. Evolutionary Bioinformatics: Orthology, Paralogy, Xenology, Molecular Phylogenetics;
2. BioQUEST's Curricular Philosophy;
3. The 3 P's; and
4. Theoretical, mathematical and computational aspects that underlie bioinformatics.

The discussions focus on how to analyze data, how to implement bioinformatics investigations across the curriculum, and how to develop sustained collaboration. Each full participant will receive a copy of our book Microbes Count!: Problem Posing, Problem Solving, and Persuading Peers in Microbiology which has seven bioinformatics labs that we will use in the workshop.

For college teachers of:

Microbiology who are interested in implementing bioinformatics across his or her microbiology curriculum by incorporating bioinformatics into a variety of courses, as well as mathematicians and computer scientists who are interested in teaching bioinformatics or computational molecular biology and interacting with microbiologists.

Prerequisites:

An interest in teaching microbiology or mathematics or computer science using bioinformatics.

Sponsored by a grant from the National Science Foundation (DUE/CCLI-ND),
the American Society for Microbiology

and the