Bioinformatics has become one of the most wanted fields by hundreds of students and professionals in the area of ??computer science regarding in-site or online bachelor degree programs, and of course, the most prestigious accredited online universities have been offering a handful of advanced online courses on computational biology from an interdisciplinary viewpoint.

These online-accredited universities are giving high quality educational content focused to be applied in mathematics, computer science, statistics, chemistry, biochemistry, artificial intelligence, among other thematic areas. On the other hand, the University of Washington, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Toronto, and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai are those that are offering these online free courses to the world.

• Biology Meets Programming: Bioinformatics for Beginners – University of California San Diego.

This online course covers all algorithms for solving various biological problems along with a handful of programming tasks helping the students to implement these algorithms in Python.? It compromises students with a gently-paced overview to the university?s Bioinformatics Specialization, preparing all students to take the first course in the Specialization, “Finding Hidden Messages in DNA”.

Individually, the four weeks in the course consist of two obligatory modules.? First, a shared textbook that delivers Python programming tasks that are created from real biological problems.? If the students haven’t programmed in Python before, or haven?t taken an online degree program that teach them how to, there is no problem because the accredited online university provides exercises from the Codecademy Python track. The best part of this course is that each page in their shared textbook has its own discussion forum, where all participants can act together with other learners. Second, each week will culminate in a summary quiz related to all the knowledge delivered in classes.

• Network Analysis in Systems Biology – School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

This distance learning program brings an introduction to data integration and statistical systems used in current Systems Biology, Bioinformatics and Systems Pharmacology investigation. The course offers techniques to process raw data from genome-wide mRNA expression studies taking into account data normalization, differential expression, clustering, enrichment analysis and network construction.

The online course holds real-world tutorials for using tools and setting up pipelines, but it also covers the mathematics after the techniques applied within the tools. The online distance learning program is mostly appropriate for beginning graduate students and advanced undergraduates majoring in fields such as biology, math, physics, chemistry, computer science, biomedical and electrical engineering, but it does not matter if they hold an online degree. The course should be useful for researchers who encounter large datasets in their own research, so online masters students are also invited to participate on this project.

The last suggestion from the online accredited university is that students must use the techniques presented for studying their own data for their own projects. For those participants that do not work in the area, if they have an online degree in other area, the online course introduces the current research challenges faced in the field of computational systems biology.