The Faculty of Bionics and Information Technologies aims at the education of anthropocentric information technology based on a broad spectrum of fundamental subjects including the basics of biology, as well as state-of-the-art electronic engineering and measuring technologies. Bionics is a special focus of the Faculty which can be defined as an industry emerging from the synergies of information technology, biotechnology, and nanotechnology, with large and rapidly growing markets in the biomedical area. The Faculty believes that this broad area of innovative technologies requires a new kind of experts able to combine a variety of skills ranging from advanced computer programming to instruments design to microfluidics to high-throughput bioinformatics.
The Bioinformatics Lab (BL) was established in 2010, with the aim of creating a novel bioinformatics curriculum tailored to the needs of bionics students. This is a challenging task as bioinformatics is becoming the central medium of scientific discoveries, medical diagnosis, and biological data collection. We believe that teaching bioinformatics to the next generation of engineers requires more than teaching only algorithms and software tools as often seen in traditional bioinformatics courses, but rather it requires a) an introduction to the unifying principles underlying current methods of data collection and data interpretation, as well as b) thematic lectures in selected areas. A key of this approach is to divide the course into theory and hands-on sessions, the latter of which concentrates on programming tools, software, and databases.
An essential part of this curriculum is competitive BSc, MSc and PhD research projects capable to provide a strong bioinformatics background related to various fields of genomics. Our current projects include genomics of bacterial communities, development of next-generation bioinformatics tools and advance methods of mining biological data.