Lectures' topics

 

September 22^nd, 2025

 

Introduction to Pattern Discovery for Life Sciences.

Big Data: Astronomical or Genomical?

September 29^th, 2025

 

Recall of some fundamentals in Biology: proteins, DNA, RNA.

October 1^st, 2025

 

Replication, protein synthesis. The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology. Reading Frames. Junk DNA. Exercises on protein synthesis.

October 6^th, 2025

 

Introduction to Alignment. Homology and similarity.

Pairwise alignment. Naive algorithm and a very simple way of computing the score.

October 8^th, 2025

 

Pairwise Alignment - gaps allowed: score computation.

Different criteria for evaluating pairings either in the nucleotidic case or in the protein case.

Dot plots matrices.

October 13^th, 2025

 

Dynamic Programming algorithms for alignment: Needleman & Wunsch Algorithm.

October 15^th, 2025

 

Global alignment through Needleman & Wunsch Algorithm.

October 20^th, 2025

 

Needleman & Wunsch Algorithm coding.

October 22^th, 2025

 

Needleman & Wunsch Algorithm coding.

October 27^th, 2025

 

Needleman & Wunsch Algorithm coding.

October 29^th, 2025

 

Needleman & Wunsch Algorithm coding. Smith & Waterman algorithm.

November 5^th, 2025

 

Smith & Waterman Algorithm coding.

November 17^th, 2025

 

A general method applicable to the search for similarities in the amino acid sequence of two proteins, by Needleman and Wunsch.

Edit distance and Edit Graphs. Introduction to the heuristic algorithms. The filtering technique.

November 19^th, 2025

 

Fasta. Blast.

Pairwise Alignment biological applications. Exercises on FastA and Blast.

November 24^th, 2025

 

Multiple Sequence Alignment. Algorithms based on Dynamic Programming and their running time. Less expensive alternatives in terms of running time.

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