Teaching Structural Bioinformatics at the Undergraduate Level

Abstract

Understanding the basic principles of structural biology is becoming a major subject of study in most undergraduate level programs in biology. In the genomic and proteomic age, it is becoming indispensable for biology students to master concepts related to the sequence and structure of proteins in order to develop skills that may be useful in a wide range of applications. Within this context, this article shows a scheme for teaching structural biology based on hands-on computer approaches, including computational genomics, and structural bioinformatics tools. The students learn to use most of the leading computer programs available for the complete path that goes from sequence to structure and eventually function. During the course, they are taught to build models of proteins based on sequence and structure information. The students are also provided with a critical point of view on automatic procedures and learn to discern between likely and unlikely structures of their final models.