Horario: 9 a 12 hs.
The advent of recombinant DNA technology during the 1970s has led to an
inundation of biological sequence data. The compilation and analysis of
DNA and protein sequences is now a fundamental task in molecular biology.
Computational Molecular Biology is the field of computer science that has
emerged to solve algorithmic problems in determining sequences and analysing
them. Specific research efforts in this area include sequencing and mapping,
pairwise and multiple sequence comparison, protein structure determinatios
and evolutionary tree reconstruction. Solutions to these problems contribute
both to basic scientific research and product development in the biotechnology
industry. We have designed a course to give a basic introduction to the
major algorithmic research areas in computational biology. The course includes
some preliminar instruction in biology and string algorithms.
SUBJECT OUTLINE:
1. Introductory material
a) General Biology
i. Biological sequences: DNA, RNA and Proteins
ii. Mutations
iii. Gene and genome structure
b) General Algorithms
i. Notation
ii. Exact string matching
iii. Dynamic programming: global and local pairwise sequence alignment
2. Sequence Analysis
a) Pairwise alignement revisited: los-odds statistics, substitution mat
rices, gap penalty functions
b) Database searching: BLAST, FASTA
c) Multiple sequence alignment
3. Sequencing and Mapping
a) Recombinant DNA technology
b) Sequence assembly
c) Physical mapping
4. Protein Structure
a) Introduction to structural classification
b) Tertiary protein structure prediction
c) Prediction of secondary structure
d) Motif recognition: statistical and computational learnig methods
e) Protein folding and lattice models
5. Evolutionary Trees
a) Molecular evolution: paralogy, gene trees, mutational models
b) Multiple sequence alignment and tree reconstruction
c) Phylogeny construction: maximun likehood estimation and distance methods
6. Optional Special Topics
a) Gene parsing
b)Indentifying repeated sequences
c)Genome rearrangements
d)Phylogeny comparison