CHOICE1

Bioinformatics is a discipline at the crossroads of computer science, mathematics, and life sciences. It relies in particular on the use and development of computer tools for analyzing massive amounts of biological data. Ultimately, this big data can be organized into online searchable databases so that users can extract data relevant to a biological problem.

The "Bioinformatics Applied to Plant Biology" teaching unit aims to familiarize students with the use of databases and offer an introduction to data exploration using R software.

Almost all of the teaching will take the form of practical case studies in the computer lab in small groups of students.

In the first part, students will learn the basics of the R programming language, enabling them to organize and clean their raw data so that it can be fully exploited for subsequent analysis. They will then learn how to produce clear graphical representations based on biological data. Particular attention will be paid to writing reusable scripts and choosing the appropriate graphics for the calculations, depending on the biological question.

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

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In this EU, students work in groups to conduct bibliographic research on a selection of medicinal plants during supervised tutorials in order to identify the plant's biomolecules that may have biological or even pharmacological properties. Using documents provided to them, each group identifies, proposes, and implements in practical work an extraction protocol and a simple biological activity test protocol to test the biostatic, antibiotic, or antioxidant activity of the targeted molecules. The literature review process and the results obtained in practical work, along with their analysis and interpretation, will be discussed during a poster presentation session, which will be assessed.

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