The course is designed to enable students to utilize bioinformatics approaches and software to better understand biomolecular structure, function, and evolution. It is primarily aimed at students interested in biology and biophysics wishing to receive practical training in the following topics: molecular genetic foundations of protein structure and evolution, sequence alignment scoring systems, and current software tools to discover and interpret molecular function and variation. The course will involve hands-on use of readily available software including PyMol (structure visualization), Python (file manipulation), JalView and MEGA for sequence and phylogenetic analyses, and publicly available computational resources of sequence analysis and structure prediction using homology modeling.