Every bioinformatics tool works on data that comes from a living cell, so it helps to know what that data actually represents. This module covers the biology you need before touching any code: what DNA, RNA, and proteins are, and how they relate to one another.
You'll start with the difference between DNA and RNA, then look at how DNA is organised into chromosomes and genes. From there you'll follow the central dogma, the flow of information from DNA to RNA to protein through transcription and translation, and see how a cell builds a protein step by step.
These ideas come back in every later module. A FASTA file is a DNA or protein sequence, an RNA-seq experiment measures transcripts, and a variant matters because of what it does to a gene or protein. Once you've finished, move on to Biological Databases & File Formats.
The vocabulary of DNA: how it is packaged into chromosomes and chromatin, plus a first look at replication, transcription, and translation.
How genetic information flows from DNA to RNA to protein, and how this idea ties together the rest of molecular biology.
How a cell reads a gene and builds a protein: transcription in the nucleus, then translation on the ribosome.