The past 15 years have been exciting ones in plant biology. Hundreds of plant genomes have been sequenced, RNA-seq has enabled transcriptome-wide expression profiling, and a proliferation of "-seq"-based methods has permitted protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions to be determined cheaply and in a high-throughput manner. These data sets in turn allow us to generate hypotheses at the click of a mouse or tap of a finger.The Plant Bioinformatics Specialization on Coursera introduces core bioinformatic competencies and resources, such as NCBI's Genbank, Blast, multiple sequence alignments, phylogenetics in Bioinformatic Methods I, followed by protein-protein interaction, structural bioinformatics and RNA-seq analysis in Bioinformatic Methods II. In Plant Bioinformatics we cover 33 plant-specific online tools from genome browsers to transcriptomic data mining to promoter/network analyses and others. Last, a Plant Bioinformatics Capstone uses these tools to hypothesize a biological role for a gene of unknown function, summarized in a written lab report.This specialization is useful to any modern plant molecular biologist wanting to get a feeling for the incredible scope of data available to researchers. A small amount of R programming is introduced in Bioinformatic Methods II, but most of the tools are web applications. It is recommended that you have access to a laptop or desktop computer for running these as they may not work as mobile applications on your phone or tablet.
This course is really useful, the teacher explains clearly and He uses real examples. Additionally, the tools that are reviewed are efficient and interesting for current bioinformatic analysis
Dear professor Provart, My sincere thanks for a hugely beneficial course in Bioinformatic II. Your teaching made a significant difference. Elshiekh Khidir
a good course to get you familiar with important signalling pathways
The course was quite enlightening and educative. It has provided me with more information about other plant databases apart from NCBI that I know of.Thank you.
A fully recommended course for those who wish to understand the basics and strengthen their skills in Bioinformatics. A well-designed and precise course. Thank you Dr. Nicholas Provart. :-)
I was a very very useful course, specially the heatmap plot generation and R language lab exercises was great!
Professor Provart is very good and the labs taught us in simple and direct instructions how to perform a wide range of analysis regarding Plant Bioinformatics.
Excellent bioinformatic training and experience. It gave me confidence in how to do the online work. Thank you.
This is one of the most exciting & knowledge providing course, I did. Professor Provart explained all the things in detail & the labs were well-illustrated.
I use this course as a good resource it has been very helpfull for me the explanation of Dr Provart are incredibly good.
Excellent Course for understanding advance bioinformatics across plant genome and proteome databses.
Great tour through the main areas of bioinformatics. I learned to use a lot of powerful tools for bioinformatic analyses as well as important topics like phylogenetics and metagenomics.
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Very light on details. For many of the assignments, the target web site tools had changed, or produced different results than expected for the answers. I would have liked a lot more written material over the lecture material.
I have two opinions about this course. POSITIVE OPINION: It is helpful because one can know about the online gene bank and solving problem using web access. NEGATIVE OPINION: The assignments or the quizzes of this course are not helpful. The questions are not that much clear and all the answers are not easy to find and the referred websites gives different results , so one can't understand whether he is right or wrong and one must apply trial and error sometimes. And the FINAL QUIZ is just a disaster, question is very unclear and lack of information and four out of that five question can't be answered without applying trial and error. In conclusion, I am grateful about the POSITIVE side, but I am very much dissatisfied of the NEGATIVE sides. Thank you.
Need better explanation of basics and terms.
Painful to watch and boring as hell!
The course lecture is not updated for more than 5 years, but the tools the lecture use is updated because of outer software or internet site.
I couldn't manipulate the tools as the course indicated because of above reason some times.
Wow. It was a great course. I would not classify this as a beginner course though: this would probably be a 300/400 level upperclassman course. At a bare minimum, one should have introductory biology knowledge. At least one biochemistry and cell biology course each is recommended as a prerequisite IMO.
I probably have more experience than most people taking this course, as I have a Ph.D. in molecular genetics but wanted to understand bioinformatics better. I have experience with BLAST and Clustal as part of my thesis project. Even so, I have learned inordinate amounts of knowledge from this course. I would say it was the right mix of lectures and hands-on lab material.
As someone who has teaching experience, I know how hard it is to design a course. There definitely has been an unimaginable amount of hard work and careful thought that went behind this coursework. Kudos to the professor!
It is worth taking as it has a lot of valuable information suited for beginners in bioinformatics who seek entry level but still knowledgeable content. The labs were quite fun, and the quizzes were easy. The further readings were spectacular, especially the paper listed in the last lab authored by El-Metwally S, Hamza T, Zakiria M, Helmy M. 2013. Next-Generation Sequence Assembly: Four Stages of Data Processing and Computational Challenges. PLoS Computational Biology.
If you are a noob in (Bio)informatics, such as myself, and you need a quick and easy to follow introduction to Blast search, Multiple sequence alignments, phylogenetic assemblies and other basic bioinformatics tools required in modern biology take this course! Labs are really nice because they give you a step by step guide on how to do the tasks, how and why to fiddle with the settings. Probably gonna do Bioinformatics II as well.
This course is very well organized, easy to understand, and explained everything steps by step which will help to grasp the concept easily. If you are a beginner like me, you should take this course.
I enjoyed doing the course. It is exciting to see how much one can learn from a few gene or protein sequences. Thank you for making the course understandable to a beginner in bioinformatics!
The videos were very clear on how to use various bioinformatic tools. I found no difficulty in understanding them. Really enjoyed the course. Looking forward to the next part of this course!
A good, interesting and attractive introduction to Bioinformatic methods. Professor Provart is able to make thing easy, whilst showing you how to exploit data and tools freely - well ... usually, they are for free - available on the Internet.
I suggest this course to everyone approaching the topic. Personally, I will also take Bioinformatic Method II to be initiated to elements of structural Bioinformatic methods.
The 5th star is missing because I would like to have some more insights about some underlying "reasons why". But, I reckon this as my own peculiarity.
Good job, Professor Provart! And thank you very much for this!
Good course but I didn't liked the videos. He spoke too slowly. I guess, it would be better if the course offers besides to the video script a written script (such as in week 1).
Course depends too much on multiple third-party sites to be as enlightening as I had hoped. I learned about some great resources, but that's about it.
This was the course I've been searching for — I needed a fast primer on bioinformatic methods and how to complete phylogenetic analysis using software and databases with no prior knowledge to complete my Masters thesis, and this course covered everything I needed to know in a way that was clear and concise. Learning methods were informative through step-by-step labs that allowed you work at your own pace, examine real data, and understand the methodology. This class, unlike others, lets you leave with a real set of skills rather than exclusively "textbook" knowledge. I'd highly recommend for anyone needing a primer on computational biology.
I've been on and off Bioinformatics beginner courses, without successfully completing any, until I took this course. Prof Provart gives the course in a way that is both challenging and inspiring, I was always looking forward to what I would study in the following course, so much so that sometimes I'd take two or three week's worth of courses in one! Thank you for making me believe I can traverse the intricacies of Bioinformatics with my purely biological training. I highly encourage absolute beginners to bioinformatics with no coding skills (like myself) to take this course. Many thanks Sir
I really like the lecturer. What I love the most is that his laboratory experience. And although sometimes it is hard to understand, I finally can make it anyway. He makes me understand the concept of bioinformatic from the basic, that helps me to understand a lot of methods that I used to have no idea before. I wish he were my lecturer when I was in uni. His students must be luck to have him. There are a lot of things I want to write about him but I am not sure if he will read. So I wish he will keep the warmness of his teaching style. I will go back again to this course. Thank you
The course is thought by an amazing instructor who was obviously giving his best to explain the basic concepts in bioinformatics to his audience! I would especially emphasize how useful labs were, as well as the quality of weekly quizzes and the final course assignment. I am recommending this course to beginners in bioinformatics with prior background in genetics, molecular biology, or at least in biology in general, as well as to everyone who would like to refresh their memory and develop bioinformatics-friendly way of thinking.
The online lectures were very informative and I learned and came to know several new tools and their applications. The efforts made by Prof Nicholas to make the lectures simple and informative is very much appreciable.
Great course. All lectures provide a biological context for the tools you learn in the labs. The labs themselves provide a great introduction to the many tools available for bioinformatic analysis.