This page summarizes courses in which our lab members have been actively involved, either implementing, deploying, and coordinating them, or delivering theory or practical sessions. While most of this teaching is conducted at the Biology school of the Universitat de Barcelona (UB), a portion is incorporated into interuniversity degrees or master’s programs, which may involve teaching at different locations.
Bachelor Degrees
Bioinformatics for undergrads [UB]
The course is a third year 6 ECTS credits compulsory subject on three Universitat de Barcelona (UB) bachelor degrees: BSc in Biochemistry, BSc in Biotecnology, and BSc in Biomedical Sciences. It is also an optional fourth year subject for the BSc in Biology. We were teaching this subject from 2010/11 to nowadays (2024/25, 15 years).
Computational Genomics [UB/UPC/UPF/UAB]
The course is part of the UB/UPC/UPF/UAB Interuniversity BSc in Bioinformatics, it is a compulsory subject of 6 ECTS credits (4 ECTS credits until course 2024/25) and is delivered on the first quarter of the third year of the degree. We were teaching this subject from 2018/19 to nowadays (2024/25, 7 years).
Other Bachelor Lectures
- “Genetics: Genetic Analysis” [UB]
- “Life Origins & Evolution” [UB]
Practicums and Bachelor Projects/Theses (TFGs)
We have directed or tutored Final Projects of students from different Bachelor degrees at Biology school (UB), an updated list of the defensed works is available from this link.
Master Degrees
Advanced Bioinformatics (BIA) [UB]
The course is part of the Universitat de Barcelona (UB) MSc in Genetics and Genomics, it is an optional subject of 2.5 ECTS credits and is delivered late on the first semester (between December and January). This course deals with concepts of Genomics to introduce some basic programming concepts and computational tools to facilitate the automation of analyses, leading to repeatability (obtaining the same results from a given software tool or protocol), reproducibility (being able to replicate the analyses from a previous work or from an already published one), and repurposability (to adapt the code or protocol to novel datasets or to solve novel problems). We will focus on the Unix command line interpreter, the “bash shell”, on the “R shell”, as well as on some general tools to process data files and command-line versions of sequence analysis software (such as BLAST or gene-finding tools). Examples are be provided along the course to illustrate how those tools and processes can be integrated into bioinformatics protocols reporting all the steps of a Computational Biology experiment (using MarkDown, for instance). We were teaching this subject from 2012/13 to nowadays (2024/25, 13 years); it was derived from two previous optional subjects form the MSc in Developmental Biology and Genetics, “BIA1: Computational Tools” and “BIA2: Algorithms”, both of 2.5 ECTS credits and taught from 2007/08 to 2011/12 (5 years).
Algorithms and Operative Systems (ALG) [UB/UPF]
This course illustrates the most basic tools and programming concepts, as well as it provides an introduction to operative systems (OS). Particular effort is taken on how to efficiently use GNU/Linux as programming environment where we can perform Bioinformatics analyses. We were teaching on this subject from 2008/09 to 2021/22 (14 years).
Introduction to Programming in Perl (PER) [UB/UPF]
This course will introduce the basic elements of programming, learning how to implement tools on top of those basic bricks; this includes building data structures based on variables and references, to control execution flow with conditionals and loops, and how to reuse code, with functions and code libraries. The main goal is to acquire basic abilities to outline and design algorithmic approaches to solve specific questions, and to implement them into a software tool. Although Python is gaining popularity those days, Perl is still a robust programming language commonly used, in general, for text processing, filtering records, etc. We will use Perl as a vehicular language to get inside some of those programming concepts, first because it was pretty much popular in the genomics era, used for instance in the EnsEmbl genome browser engine, and second because there are still many labs developing and maintaining code written in this language. Thus, programming capabilities will be reinforced during this course, and we will introduce Perl syntax elements to add another language to our programming tool-set. We were teaching on this subject from 2009/10 to nowadays (2024/25, 15 years).
Other Master Lectures
Master Projects/Theses (TFMs)
We have directed or tutored Final Projects of students from different Masters, an updated list of the defensed works is available from this link.
Doctoral Programmes
We have directed or tutored students from different doctorate programs: the Genetics program (UB), the Bioinformatics mention of the Biomedicine program (UB), and the interuniversity Bioinformatics program (UAB/UB/UPC/URV/UdG/UdL/UOC/UVic-UCC).