CPSC/BICH 689 Special Topics in Computational Biology
Fall 04
Instructor: Sing-Hoi Sze
Email: shsze@cs.tamu.edu
Meeting: MWF 3-3:50 HRBB 204
Office hours: MWF 2-3 or by appointment
What is Computational Biology
Computational Biology is the application of computational techniques to
solve problems in biology, which involves DNA and proteins.
Traditionally, people from various disciplines, such as computer science,
mathematics and statistics, formulate and address these problems within
their own disciplines. More recently, multi-disciplinary
collaborations become the norm, which include participations of biologists and
biochemists.
Goal
The main purpose of the course is to expose students to various active
research areas in computational biology. Everyone who is interested in
computational biology is encouraged to take the course.
For most topics, considerable time will be spent on presenting latest
research ideas, mostly from the computer science point of view. Emphasis will
be placed on problem formulation, where many problems in genomics and
proteomics will be seen as graph-theoretic or optimization problems.
The focus of the lectures is on presenting the newest computational
approaches from research papers after briefly describing classical approaches
in each area.
Topics
- Approaches for DNA and EST sequence assembly, its formulation as the
shortest common superstring problem, and other heuristic approaches.
- Computational formulations and algorithms for biological sequence
comparison problems, including the longest common subsequence formulation,
pairwise and multiple sequence alignment approaches, and techniques for
biological database search.
- Combinatorial and statistical approaches to motif finding and
its application to find regulatory sites, including statistical optimization
techniques, clique-based graph-theoretic formulations, tree-based
branch-and-bound techniques, and the random projection technique.
- Computational approaches to gene finding and gene structure prediction,
including ab-initio and similarity-based approaches.
- Scalable algorithms for comparative genomics and whole genome comparisons.
- Study of genome rearrangements as mathematical operations on permutations
and inferring evolutionary relationships as phylogenetic trees.
- RNA and protein structure prediction and techniques for studying protein
folding pathways with or without known native state.
- Probe selection problem for microarray design and approaches for
clustering microarray expression data.
- Computational proteomics and finding similar substructures in biological
networks by graph-based methods.
Prerequisites
Graduate classification or approval of instructor.
Grading
Homework Assignments (40%)
- Consists of short written assignments handed out every one or two weeks.
These exercises will emphasize creativity in problem solving.
Presentation (40%)
- Towards the end of the semester, each student will give a short
presentation either on a paper of interest or on a survey of a research
area.
Final Exam (20%)
References
Computational Biology books
- Baldi P. and Brunak S. (2001) Bioinformatics: The Machine Learning
Approach, Second Edition. The MIT Press.
- Clote P. and Backofen R. (2000) Computational Molecular Biology: An
Introduction. John Wiley & Sons.
- Durbin R., Eddy S., Krogh A., and Mitchison G. (1998) Biological
Sequence Analysis: Probabilistic Models of Proteins and Nucleic Acids.
Cambridge University Press.
- Gusfield D. (1997) Algorithms on Strings, Trees and Sequences:
Computer Science and Computational Biology. Cambridge University Press.
- Pevzner P.A. (2000) Computational Molecular Biology: An Algorithmic
Approach. The MIT Press.
- Setubal J.C. and Meidanis J. (1997) Introduction to Computational
Molecular Biology. PWS Publishing Company.
- Waterman M.S. (1995) Introduction to Computational Biology: Maps,
Sequences and Genomes. Chapman & Hall.
Computer Science books
- Cormen T.H., Leiserson C.E., Rivest R.L., and Stein C. (2001)
Introduction to Algorithms, Second Edition. The MIT Press.
Biology books
- Lodish H., Berk A., Zipursky S.L., Matsudaira P., Baltimore D., and
Darnell J. (2000) Molecular Cell Biology, Fourth Edition. W.H.
Freeman.