Bioinformatics Fundamentals: Identifying Viral Pathogens

How do scientists rapidly identify a new virus and track its mutations in real time? In the modern era, combatting global health crises relies on bioinformatics—the intersection of biology, data science, and computing. This text-only course guides you from absolute beginner to understanding how viral genomes are sequenced, analyzed, and identified. You will gain a practical foundation in genomic data analysis without needing a laboratory. What you'll learn: Understand the core biological concepts of viral genomes, DNA, RNA, and mutation rates; Navigate public genomic databases to find and retrieve pathogen sequence data; Compare viral sequences using basic alignment algorithms to detect evolutionary relationships; Analyze genomic data using modern python libraries tailored for bioinformatics; Identify unknown pathogens by matching sequence fragments to known reference genomes; Discover how bioinformaticians track viral variants and mutations during an outbreak. You will begin by learning key genetic terminology and the structure of viral pathogens before moving into practical text-based explanations. Through step-by-step written guides, you will learn how to read sequence files, use alignment tools, and interpret genomic data. This course is designed for curious beginners, aspiring data analysts, and students interested in health sciences who want to understand the digital side of epidemiology. No prior programming or advanced biology experience is required. Start your journey into computational biology and learn how data is used to fight infectious diseases.