Computer Laboratory

Course pages 2016–17

Bioinformatics

Principal lecturer: Dr Pietro Lio'
Taken by: Part II
Past exam questions

No. of lectures: 12
Suggested hours of supervisions: 3

Aims

This course focuses on algorithms used in Bioinformatics and System Biology. Most of the algorithms are general and can be applied in other fields on multidimensional and noisy data. All the necessary biological terms and concepts useful for the course and the examination will be given in the lectures. The most important software implementing the described algorithms will be demonstrated.

Lectures

  • Introduction to biological data: Bioinformatics as an interesting field in computer science.

  • Dynamic programming. Longest common subsequence, DNA global and local alignment, linear space alignment, Nussinov algorithm for RNA, heuristics for multiple alignment.

  • Sequence database search. Blast.

  • Genome sequencing. De Bruijn graph.

  • Phylogeny. Distance based algorithms (UPGMA, Neighbour-Joining). Parsimony-based algorithms.

  • Clustering. Hard and soft K-means clustering, use of Expectation Maximization in clustering, Hierarchical clustering, Markov clustering algorithm.

  • Genomics Pattern Matching. Suffix Tree String Compression and the Burrows-Wheeler Transform.

  • Hidden Markov Models. The Viterbi algorithm, profile HMMs for sequence alignment, classifying proteins with profile HMMs, soft decoding problem, Baum-Welch learning

Objectives

At the end of this course students should

  • understand Bioinformatics terminology;

  • have mastered the most important algorithms in the field;

  • be able to work with bioinformaticians and biologists;

  • be able to find data and literature in repositories.

Recommended reading

* Compeau, P. & Pevzner, P.A. (2015). Bioinformatics algorithms: an active learning approach. Active Learning Publishers.
Durbin, R., Eddy, S., Krough, A. & Mitchison, G. (1998). Biological sequence analysis: probabilistic models of proteins and nucleic acids. Cambridge University Press.
Jones, N.C. & Pevzner, P.A. (2004). An introduction to bioinformatics algorithms. MIT Press.
Felsenstein, J. (2003). Inferring phylogenies. Sinauer Associates.