Bioinformatics courses in UK

Bioinformatics is a descipline of biological science that deals with application of information technology tools to the field of molecular biology. Most popular software tools used in Bioinformatics are perl, python (especially R), mysQl, c, c++, java, Matlab. BLAST and FASTA are most popular algorithms used in computational biology.

Following are some of the options available for graduate students to study Bioinformatics in UK.


Bioinformatics full time courses in UK along with links. Timesonline 2010 UK university rankings are provided in brackets.

1. University of Oxford offers a variety of Bioinformatics and systems biology courses which can lead you to M.Sc or diploma (1)
2. Cambridge computational biology institute (CCBI) offers 11 month Mphil programme in Computational biology (2)
3. Imperial college london offers M.Sc/Phd in bioinformatics (3)
4. University of Exeter offers M.Sc in bioinformatics (9)
5. University of Edinburgh M.Sc or PgDip courses (14)
6. University of Glasgow Bioinformatics courses (19)
7. University of Manchestor offers M.sc as well as M.phil in bioinformatics courses (24)
8. Cardiff University Bioinformatics courses (26)
9. University of Leeds Mres in Bioinformatics (27)
10. University of East Anglia M.Sc in Computation Biology (28)

For more options you can always visit directgov education website.


Bioinformatics part time and distance learning options

1. University of Oxford part time courses(1)
2. University of Manchester distance learning courses in computational biology(24)
3. University of Tampere Finland Bioinformatics distance learning courses

Online learning resources

A good grip of software tools is essential for progressing with any of university courses listed above. So it is always better to get a hang of following tools before starting the courses to keep up to pace with other students.

1. Introduction to bioinformatics
2. NCBI bioinformatics tutorials
3. You tube C Programming tutorials just introduce you to programming. It is recommended to follow exact syntax in C programming language by K & R.
4. Object oriented analysis and design by cay horstmann: Object oriented programming is totally different aimed at extensible and easily maintainable systems (systems that undergo constant enhancements and modifications). As such its better to learn design patterns and object oriented analysis and design concepts here. So follow concepts in the text book.
5. Sun Java tutorial pay more attention to Swing, JDBC, RMI and Beans.
6. You tube C++ tutorial and C++ STL guide
7. Bioperl
8. Statistical computing with R: tutorial
9. Matlab tutorial
10. Dynamic programming

Bioinformatics algorithm resources
Can be used during university course to enhance your understanding.

1. Computational biology algorithms
2. Molecular biology algorithms

Miscellaneous

1. Videos on Molecular biology basics
2. NCBI work bench to view and analyse publicly available sequence databases at NCBI along with your own private data.
3. EBI video tutorials
4. EBI bioinformatic tutorials