Course Overview
Bioinformatics is a newly emerging interdisciplinary research area in which Molecular Biology, Biochemistry, and Genetics as well as Theoretical and Applied Computer Science merge into a new discipline. Bioinformatics already plays an important role in all areas of Life Sciences, in particular in Pharmaceutical and Medical Sciences. Due to the explosive growth of biological data, e.g. in the context of national and international genome projects, Bioinformatics heaviliy relies on computational and mathematical methods. Modern Computer Science techniques permit the generation of mathematical models in Life Sciences, its efficient prediction, and the evaluation of these models. Progress in biological research is based more and more on techniques for modelling biological data, efficient algorithms to process biological data, and methods to extract relevant information from large biological data bases. Since methods of Bioinformatics are already industrially used and there are hardly any graduates in Bioinformatics so far, there is a high demand of skilled Bioinformaticians in industry as well as in research centers and universities. The postgraduate programme in Bioinformatics is offered at Technical University of Munich.