Bioinformatics

The Bioinformatics program is a legacy program that is no longer offered for new students, and is only available for those students that started before the 2022-2023 academic year. We provide program information below for all of these existing students. For all new students, the Bioinformatics program has been replaced with the Applied Computing program, which has a stream in Bioinformatics.

The Bioinformatics degree program is an interdisciplinary program, involving the departments of Biology, Biochemistry, Computer Science, and Mathematics & Statistics. 

The field of Bioinformatics developed during the exponential growth in molecular biological knowledge in recent years, thanks to genome sequencing projects and technologies for determining gene expression and protein-protein interaction. The tremendous volume and complexity of data has necessitated the development of specialized computational techniques for storing, visualizing, and analyzing them. Certain technologies also require computational techniques in the derivation of data. All such techniques fall into the realm of Bioinformatics.  It requires knowledge from the domains of biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, and probability and statistics.

One major or ultimate goal of bioinformatics is to accurately predict organism-level characteristics from genomic information. This will require the characterization of very complex systems, from atomic to cellular and organism levels.

For more information, contact Dr. Ian McQuillan.

Resources