CSC 414 Bioinformatics 1

Recent advances in fields such as molecular biology have brought about an enormous mass of data beyond which can be analyzed by traditional or manual methods. Fortunately, we have also seen profound advances in the area of computational power (i.e., processing speed and storage). In this course, we will examine computational problems in molecular biology and methods for solving these problems using various machine learning techniques. Topics from the area of computer science will include theory of computation, graph theory, genetic programming, artificial neural networks, decision trees, Bayesian and maximum likelihood methods. Topics from the area of molecular biology will include pair-wise and multiple sequence alignment, motif recognition, phylogenetic tree construction, and protein structure prediction. Prerequisite: CSC 302 or a 300-level Biology course.