Applied Bioinformatics MSc

1. The only Bioinformatics MSc in the UK offering a truly bespoke postgraduate experience

Cranfield University is the only solely postgraduate university in the UK, which means that every single lecture and practical session within the Applied Bioinformatics MSc is tailored to master's level. Unlike other Bioinformatics MSc courses you may come across, you won’t be sharing any modules or lectures with other undergraduate students or MSc courses. This gives our Applied Bioinformatics MSc a truly tailored postgraduate experience.

2. A variety of programming languages

Experience taught us that there is no such thing as a single preferred programming language in the field of bioinformatics. Every programming language has its strengths and advantages depending on the task in hand. For example, Java can be quite powerful if you are developing a visualisation and/or standalone application, while R and Python are excellent choices for machine learning and statistical analysis. Perl, on the other hand, is a very easy programming language to learn by biologists and forms the foundation of most of the legacy tools and frameworks developed for the human genome project, and still being used to date. This is why the Applied Bioinformatics MSc is the only course in the UK that offers three dedicated programming modules as part of the taught component, covering R, Java and Perl. Furthermore, other programming languages such as Bash, JavaEE, SQL, JavaScript and Python are also comprehensively covered. This means that upon the completion of this course, you won’t only have the skills and expertise to develop optimised bioinformatics tools for various tasks, but you will also find it relatively much easier to learn new programming languages that were not covered during the course as you will have the foundation in interpreted, object-oriented, and statistically-focused languages.

3. A truly NGS- and 3GS-focused course

Analysing sequencing data from the latest sequencing platforms such as Illumina® Pacific Biosciences ® and 10x Chromium® nowadays is a standard skill required for most bioinformatics jobs (a quick search on LinkedIn for bioinformatics jobs should prove this!) This is why the course includes two dedicated modules on analysing sequencing data. The first module, 'Next Generation Sequencing Informatics', focuses on preprocessing and analysing Illumina® short-reads sequences for performing sequence alignment, gene expression profiling using RNA-Seq, and genotyping for variant discovery. The second module, 'Advanced Sequencing Informatics and Genome Assembly', provides hands-on experience in performing de-novo sequence assembly using short and long-reads sequencing data, as well as providing computer practical sessions in developing and optimising your own assembler using the overlap-layout-consensus (OLC) and de-bruijn-graph (DBG) algorithms.

4. Industrial and research applications

Drug discovery: Applications of bioinformatics in drug discovery is not only covered in the Applied Bioinformatics MSc course but is an integral part of the delivery of the course. Leading experts from multinational pharmaceutical industry such as Enrico Ferrero (GSK) and Lee Larcombe (nexaSTEM) are core members of the teaching team of this course and actively deliver several lectures and hands-on computational practicals. These industrial partners also offer a number of thesis projects for our students each academic year.

Plant genetics: The Bioinformatics Team at Cranfield University works very closely with the Agrifood theme, which includes the Crop Water Use and the Plant Science Laboratory Groups. The Course Director has an established track record as PI or CoI several plant genetics-focused research projects. If plant genetics and food security is your research of interest, you will be given the opportunity to join one of our research team for your thesis project.

Infectious diseases: We have a long-term ongoing collaboration with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). Together, we work closely in establishing a molecular understanding of several infectious and tropical diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria and Chagas disease. Each year, we offer three to four research MSc thesis project placements for our Bioinformatics students to work closely with LSHTM’s world-renowned leading experts on one of their ongoing research projects. Over the past few years, we published a number of research articles based on such thesis projects. Our MSc students were either the leading or co-authors on these.