| Unit name | Computational Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics |
|---|---|
| Unit code | COMSM2010 |
| Credit points | 10 |
| Level of study | M/7 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
| Unit director | Professor. Gough |
| Open unit status | Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
None |
| Co-requisites |
None |
| School/department | Department of Computer Science |
| Faculty | Faculty of Engineering |
This unit will be an applied and practical compliment to unit EMATM0004. Neither will be a pre-requisite for the other but students doing one unit will be strongly encouraged to also do the other. The unit is an advanced, interdisciplinary unit for students of computer science with an interest in Biotech or biological research and for science students, including biology students, who can demonstrate ability with computers. The unit will cover aspects of molecular biology, use of bioinformatics computational tools (via the web and on a local computer) and writing scripts in PERL. The unit will focus on proteins. Initially it will cover analysis of both the 2D sequence and the 3D structure. Following this it will cover how proteins fit into the genome of an organism, ultimately leading to state-or-the-art comparative genomics between hundreds of organisms.
100% coursework comprising three summative assignments: 3-dimensional protein structure comparisons (15%), Protein Sequence Analysis (55%), Microarrays and Gene Ontology (30%)
This unit doesn't require a particular book or reading material, but below are some recommendations for those interested in additional reading.
After the evolution lectures are finished: Chothia, C. and Gough, J. (2009) Genomic and Structural Aspects of Protein Evolution. Biochem. J. 419(1), 15-28. PDF
On dynamic programming and the basics of hidden Markov models and sequence comparison methods: Biological Sequence Analysis: Probabilistic Models of Proteins and Nucleic Acids by Richard Durbin, Sean R. Eddy, Anders Krogh, and Graeme Mitchison. This one should be in the library. Sequence - Evolution - Function. Computational Approaches in Comparative Genomics Koonin, Eugene V., Galperin, Michael Y. This one is in my office, you can look at it. If it's not in the library we can request to order it. Here is a good index of papers on the available biological databases: Nucleic Acids Research 2010 Database Summary Paper Category list.
