I don't assume students have taken any biological courses like genetics and molecular biology.

There is no textbook for this course. All the materials can be found in the following reference books:

• R. Durbin et al., Biological Sequence Analysis: Probabilistic models of proteins and nucleic acids, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• D. Gusfield, Algorithms on Strings, Trees, and Sequences: Computer science and computational biology, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• N. Jones and P. Pevzner, An Introduction to Bioinformatics Algorithms MIT Press, 2004.
• Genomics and its Impact on Medicine and Society: A Primer
• Primer on Molecular Genetics.

If you like to buy one book in the subject, I would recommend Jones and Pevzner's book.