Coursera

Hacking COVID-19 — Course 5: Tracing SARS-CoV-2's Evolution (Coursera)

Offered by University of California, San Diego,
Hacking COVID-19 — Course 5: Tracing SARS-CoV-2's Evolution (Coursera)

INTROIn this course, you will follow in the footsteps of the bioinformaticians investigating the COVID-19 outbreak by tracing the evolution of SARS-CoV-2. Whether you’re new to the world of computational biology, or you’re a bioinformatics expert seeking to learn about its applications in the COVID-19 pandemic, or somewhere in between, this course is for you! As you go through this journey, we will introduce and explain genomic concepts and give you many opportunities to practice your skills, and we will provide a series of problems with gradually increasing complexity.

Class Deals by MOOC List - Click here and see Coursera's Active Discounts, Deals, and Promo Codes.

This fifth course will discuss the "Italy First" hypothesis of COVID-19 origins, and it will cover bioinformatics methods for rooting and dating a phylogenetic tree inferred from SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences.
This course is part of the Applied Bioinformatics Specialization.

Syllabus

Week 1
In Chapter 7, we will discuss how we can use rooted and dated phylogenetic trees to study the emergence of a virus, with the origins of COVID-19 as our primary inspiration, but with a real case study about HIV transmission as our focus.

Week 2
In Chapter 8, we will perform multiple sequence alignment, phylogenetic inference, tree rooting, and tree dating to investigate the "Italy First" hypothesis of COVID-19 origins.

Go to Class
MOOC List is learner-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Related Courses

Introduction to Genomic Technologies (Coursera) Coursera
Johns Hopkins University

Introduction to Genomic Technologies (Coursera)

Statistics & Data Analysis Data Science

This course introduces you to the basic biology of modern genomics and the experimental tools that we use to measure it. We'll introduce the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology and cover how next-generation sequencing can be used to measure DNA, RNA, and epigenetic patterns. You'll also get an introduction to the key concepts in computing and data science that you'll need to understand how data from next-generation sequencing experiments are generated and analyzed.

Oct 12th 2026
4 Weeks
Biology DNA RNA
Details
Genetics and Society: A Course for Educators (Coursera) Coursera
American Museum of Natural History

Genetics and Society: A Course for Educators (Coursera)

Sci: Biology & Life Sciences Education

How have advances in genetics affected society? What do we need to know to make ethical decisions about genetic technologies? This course includes the study of cloning, genetic enhancement, and ownership of genetic information. Course participants will acquire the tools to explore the ethics of modern genetics and learn how to integrate these issues into their classrooms.

Oct 19th 2026
4 Weeks
Biology Genetics DNA
Details
Bioinformatic Methods I (Coursera) Coursera
University of Toronto

Bioinformatic Methods I (Coursera)

Health & Society Statistics & Data Analysis

Large-scale biology projects such as the sequencing of the human genome and gene expression surveys using RNA-seq, microarrays and other technologies have created a wealth of data for biologists. However, the challenge facing scientists is analyzing and even accessing these data to extract useful information pertaining to the system being studied. This course focuses on employing existing bioinformatic resources – mainly web-based programs and databases – to access the wealth of data to answer questions relevant to the average biologist, and is highly hands-on.

Oct 19th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Biology Bioinformatics Molecular Biology
Details
Plant Bioinformatics (Coursera) Coursera
University of Toronto

Plant Bioinformatics (Coursera)

Health & Society Computer Science

The past 15 years have been exciting ones in plant biology. Hundreds of plant genomes have been sequenced, RNA-seq has enabled transcriptome-wide expression profiling, and a proliferation of "-seq"-based methods has permitted protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions to be determined cheaply and in a high-throughput manner. These data sets in turn allow us to generate hypotheses at the click of a mouse.

Oct 19th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Bioinformatics Plant Biology Plant Bioinformatic Methods Specialization
Details
Manejo del enfermo semicrítico y crítico por COVID-19 (Coursera) Coursera
University of Barcelona

Manejo del enfermo semicrítico y crítico por COVID-19 (Coursera)

Health & Society

Después de realizar este curso serás capaz de conocer los elementos clave del abordaje del paciente crítico y semicrítico por COVID-19, basados en la evidencia científica disponible y que puedan ayudarte en la toma de decisiones clínicas. Curso dirigido a los profesionales de medicina y enfermería, con conocimientos básicos en la atención a pacientes críticos y, que debido a la crisis sanitaria, atienden en las áreas de críticos o semicríticos COVID-19 y/o a estos pacientes fuera de su ubicación habitual.

Nov 2nd 2026
5-12 Weeks
Pharmacology Nursing Care Patient Care
Details
Genomic Data Science and Clustering (Bioinformatics V) (Coursera) Coursera
University of California, San Diego

Genomic Data Science and Clustering (Bioinformatics V) (Coursera)

Sci: Biology & Life Sciences Health & Society

How do we infer which genes orchestrate various processes in the cell? How did humans migrate out of Africa and spread around the world? In this class, we will see that these two seemingly different questions can be addressed using similar algorithmic and machine learning techniques arising from the general problem of dividing data points into distinct clusters.

Oct 19th 2026
3 Weeks
Clustering Bioinformatics Data Science
Details
Big Data Science with the BD2K-LINCS Data Coordination and Integration Center (Coursera) Coursera
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Big Data Science with the BD2K-LINCS Data Coordination and Integration Center (Coursera)

Health & Society Science

In this course we briefly introduce the DCIC and the various Centers that collect data for LINCS. We then cover metadata and how metadata is linked to ontologies. We then present data processing and normalization methods to clean and harmonize LINCS data. This follow discussions about how data is served as RESTful APIs. Most importantly, the course covers computational methods including: data clustering, gene-set enrichment analysis, interactive data visualization, and supervised learning. Finally, we introduce crowdsourcing/citizen-science projects where students can work together in teams to extract expression signatures from public databases and then query such collections of signatures against LINCS data for predicting small molecules as potential therapeutics.

Oct 19th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Network Analysis Big Data
Details
Finding Hidden Messages in DNA (Bioinformatics I) (Coursera) Coursera
University of California, San Diego

Finding Hidden Messages in DNA (Bioinformatics I) (Coursera)

Sci: Biology & Life Sciences Health & Society

This course begins a series of classes illustrating the power of computing in modern biology. Please join us on the frontier of bioinformatics to look for hidden messages in DNA without ever needing to put on a lab coat. In the first half of the course, we investigate DNA replication, and ask the question, where in the genome does DNA replication begin? We will see that we can answer this question for many bacteria using only some straightforward algorithms to look for hidden messages in the genome.

Oct 12th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Biology Algorithms DNA
Details
Comparing Genes, Proteins, and Genomes (Bioinformatics III) (Coursera) Coursera
University of California, San Diego

Comparing Genes, Proteins, and Genomes (Bioinformatics III) (Coursera)

Sci: Biology & Life Sciences Health & Society

Once we have sequenced genomes in the previous course, we would like to compare them to determine how species have evolved and what makes them different. In the first half of the course, we will compare two short biological sequences, such as genes (i.e., short sequences of DNA) or proteins. We will encounter a powerful algorithmic tool called dynamic programming that will help us determine the number of mutations that have separated the two genes/proteins.

Oct 12th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Genes DNA Genomes
Details