cbio course

Computational Methods in Molecular Biology (76558)

 


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Course Description and Goals

The face of biology has been changed by the emergence of modern molecular genetics. The three billion letter sequence of the Human genome has recently been finished and immense amounts of biological data has been rapidly accumulating. The goal is to extract understanding of biological systems at the molecular level from diverse sources of biological data. This is the driving force behind the new, quickly emerging field of bioinformatics. In this course we will introduce some of the mathematical models and computational methods used today. Students will gain a taste of the challenging problems biology presents computer scientists. We will discuss problem areas such as sequence alignment, gene and motif finding, gene expression and networks, probabilistic sequence models, phylogeny, linkage analysis, DNA polymorphism, protein function and structure. We will use techniques such as dynamic programming, graph algorithms, probabilistic modeling, Expectation Maximization method, clustering, classification, Hidden Markov Models and local search to approach some of these problems. For more details see the syllabus.

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Time & Location

  • Monday 10:00-11:45, at Sprinzak 29.
  • Tuesday 16:00-17:45, at Math 110.