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Bioinformatics is a discipline at the crossroads of computer science, mathematics and the life sciences. It is based in particular on the use and development of computer tools for the analysis of massive biological data. Eventually, these megadata can be organized into searchable online databases, enabling users to extract data relevant to a biological problem.

The aim of the "Bioinformatics applied to plant biology" teaching unit is to introduce students to the use of databases and to offer a first approach to data mining using R software.

Virtually all teaching will take the form of practical case studies in the computer room, in student sub-groups.

In the first part, students will learn the rudiments of the R computer language, enabling them to organize and clean up their raw data to make it fully exploitable for further analysis. They will then learn how to propose explicit graphical representations based on biological data. Particular attention will be paid to writing reusable scripts and choosing the graphics associated with the calculations according to the biological question at hand.

In the second part, students will use general databases such as NCBI, or databases devoted exclusively to the model plant Arabidopsis (TAIR), to carry out data mining.

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In this course, students work in groups to carry out bibliographical research on a selection of medicinal plants during tutorials, in order to identify plant biomolecules with potential biological or pharmacological properties. Using the documents provided, each group identifies, proposes and implements an extraction protocol and a simple biological activity test protocol to test the biostatic, antibiotic or antioxidant activity of the targeted molecules. The bibliographic monitoring approach and the results obtained during the practical work, together with their analysis and interpretation, will be discussed during a poster presentation session, which will lead to an assessment.

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