Introduction to bioinformatics (TTBML1455, TTBML1455_EN, T_PB9868)

The course provides an introduction to bioinformatics with particular emphasis on its applications in evolutionary genomics, ecology and population genetics. Students are introduced to major types of genomic data, including whole-genome resequencing, transcriptomic and reduced-representation datasets, as well as the principles of reference genomes and sequencing reads. The course covers essential bioinformatic file formats and workflows, including FASTA/FASTQ, SAM/BAM, VCF and PAF, together with sequence mapping, variant calling, variant filtering and sequence similarity searches. Practical exercises introduce commonly used command-line tools such as Linux utilities, seqkit, bwa-mem2, minimap2, samtools, FreeBayes, bcftools, GATK, vcftools and BLAST+. Emphasis is placed on understanding the biological and computational principles behind genomic data processing rather than on software use alone.