What you have learnt in this course

We hope you have enjoyed your time with us. During the length of this two-week course you have become familiar with DNA and protein sequences and how to represent them so they can be used in bioinformatics analysis. You also learnt about similarity searches using DNA and protein sequences and how you can use these similarities to know more about the potential functions of a previously unknown sequence. You also can now use protein databases to find conserved protein domains within a protein sequence, a key step in investigating potential protein function and in studying the determinants of virulence in microbes.

Although this course focuses on studying single genes and single proteins, much of the current research in microbiology and genomics uses a whole-genome approach to compare multiple bacterial pathogens simultaneously. During this course, you have covered the fundamentals of microbial bioinformatics and this is a strong foundation for your future development in the study of microbial genomes.