Study of computational techniques, algorithms and data structures used to solve problems in computational biology. Topics: basic biology, string alignment, phylogeny (distance, character, parsimony), molecular evolution, multiple sequence alignment, probabilistic and statistical models, Markov models, microarrays, dynamic programming, maximum likelihood and specialized DNA and protein analysis.
Objective
Familiarize the students with the basic concepts of molecular biology and the models and algorithms used to understand, classify and predict behaviour of living organism. This course is at the most basic level, where the main issues, mostly of molecular sequences, are studied.
Content
This course lies in the intersection between Computer Science and Molecular Biology. The main purpose is to study computational techniques, algorithms and data structures which are usually applied to solve problems in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. The following topics are likely to be covered: Introduction, mathematical models of evolution, protein and DNA sequence alignment and its meaning, phylogenetic tree construction, multiple sequence alignments, secondary structure prediction, molecular dynamics, threading, role of bioinformatics in drug design, etc. From the computer science point of view we concentrate our attention in practical solutions for the above problems. Biological knowledge is an asset but not a prerequisite.