CSC 513 Bioinformatics

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. Topics from the area of computer science will include computationally tractable and intractable problems, artificial neural networks, decision trees, Bayesian belief networks and hidden Markov models. Topics from the area of molecular biology will include DNA fragment assembly, pair-wise and multiple sequence alignment, motif recognition, phylogenetic tree construction, protein structure prediction. The course will survey several of the available software packages, such as FASTA, BLAST, PSI-BLAST, and PHD.