The seminar is addressed primarily at students enrolled in the MSc CBB programme. Students of other ETH study programmes interested in this course need to ask the lecturer for permission to enrol in the course.
The Seminar will be offered in autumn semester in Basel (involving professors and lecturers from the University of Basel) and in spring semester in Zurich (involving professors and lecturers from the University of Zurich). Professors and lecturers from ETH Zurich are involved in both semesters.
Computational Biology und Bioinformatik analysieren lebende Systeme mit Methoden der Informatik. Das Seminar kombiniert Präsentationen von Studierenden und Forschenden, um das sich schnell entwickelnde Gebiet aus der Informatikperspektive zu skizzieren. Themenbereiche sind Sequenzanalyse, Proteomics, Optimierung und Bio-inspired computing, Systemmodellierung, -simulation und -analyse.
Learning objective
Studying and presenting fundamental papers of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. Learning how to make a scientific presentation and how classical methods are used or further developed in current research.
Content
Computational biology and bioinformatics aim at advancing the understanding of living systems through computation. The complexity of these systems, however, provides challenges for software and algorithms, and often requires entirely novel approaches in computer science. The aim of the seminar is to give an overview of this rapidly developing field from a computer science perspective. In particular, it will focus on the areas of (i) DNA sequence analysis, sequence comparison and reconstruction of phylogenetic trees, (ii) protein identification from experimental data, (iii) optimization and bio-inspired computing, and (iv) systems analysis of complex biological networks. The seminar combines the discussion of selected research papers with a major impact in their domain by the students with the presentation of current active research projects / open challenges in computational biology and bioinformatics by the lecturers. Each week, the seminar will focus on a different topic related to ongoing research projects at ETHZ, thus giving the students the opportunity of obtaining knowledge about the basic research approaches and problems as well as of gaining insight into (and getting excited about) the latest developments in the field.
Literature
Original papers to be presented by the students will be provided in the first week of the seminar.
Performance assessment
Performance assessment information (valid until the course unit is held again)
Performance assessment as a semester course