Pablo Fernández, student of the Diploma in Bioinformatics of the School of Sciences of the University of Navarra, talks about his final project

Students and professors of the diploma in Bioinformatics of the School de Ciencias. PHOTO: Manuel Castells

15 students of Biology and Biochemistry have been part of the first promotion of Diploma in Bioinformatics, a new specialization program taught by the School of Sciences of the University of Navarra.

One of the students, Pablo Fernández - who is studying 5th year of Biology and 2nd year of Biochemistry - emphasizes that this specialization program "can serve us as tool of work no matter where we are, since Bioinformatics is an expanding discipline ".

Designed for students who want to dedicate themselves to the research in Biomedicine, this program is composed of subjects related to computer science, information technology, statistics and probabilistic methods, as well as Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, which students choose throughout their degree program and that allow them to deepen in computer structure, operating systems, programming, creation and management of instructions of data, etc. Knowledge necessary to approach the study of biological systems in biomedicine, where they will perform experiments with microarrays, nucleotide and protein sequence alignments, or genome analysis, among other tests.

Finding genetic mutations in cancer
Pablo Fernández, student of the first promotion of Diploma, has carried out his final project on the genetic promoters to which the STAT1 transcription factor binds throughout the human genome: "With this we intend to be able, in the future, to see if these genes are related to a specific cancer subject , since it has been shown that other factors similar to this -such as STAT5- are involved in the development of this subject of ailments".