BioInformatics applied to plant biology

Bioinformatics is a discipline at the crossroads of computer science, mathematics and 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 so that a user can extract data relevant to a biological problem.

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

Almost all the teaching will be done in the form of practical cases in the computer room in sub-groups of students.

In the first part, students will learn the basics of the R language to organize and clean their raw data in order to make them fully exploitable for further analysis. Then, they will learn how to propose explicit graphical representations from biological data. Particular attention will be given to the writing of reusable scripts and the choice of graphs associated with the calculations according to the biological question.

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

• Know how to manage data to support projects in biology
• Know how to implement the principles of reproducible science
• Know how to manipulate data to extract relevant information
• Conceptualize problems related to the analysis of biological data and implement appropriate methodological responses

Know how to search for information in databases