CS 439 Computational Biology Course Web Site, Fall 1996


Professor: Steven Salzberg, salzberg@cs.jhu.edu
Time: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 4:30-5:45 p.m.
Location: Shaffer Hall Room 304

This course is co-listed in the Medical School, Department of Biomedical Information Sciences, as ME 600.802.

Textbook: Introduction to Computational Biology: Maps, Sequences, and Genomes by Michael Waterman. Publisher: Chapman & Hall. Publication date: June 1995. 430 pages. ISBN 0-412-99391-0.

Homework assignments

Syllabus

Week 0, Sept. 5. First day of class. Introduction to the course and text. Overview of computational biology.

Week 1, Sept. 10 and 12. Introduction, biological background. Topic: Molecular biology for non-biologists. Restriction mapping and interval graphs.

Reading:

Week 2, Sept. 17 and 19. Mapping probes and clones. Sequence-tagged site mapping and why it is computationally ``hard.'' Simulated annealing applied to contig assembly. Mapping by fingerprinting.

Reading:

Week 3, Sept. 24 and 27. No class on Thursday, Sept 26. Instead, there is a special seminar on Friday.


SPECIAL SEMINAR on Friday, Sept. 27, the first in our Computational Biology Seminar Series. David Searls of SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals and the University of Pennsylvania will speak on "The Linguistics of DNA." The lecture is at 4:30pm in Shaffer Hall room 3.

Week 4, Oct. 1 and 3. Sequence alignment, part 1: global distance alignment, global similarity alignment, and local alignment.

Reading:

Week 5, Oct. 8 and 10. Large-scale shotgun assembly (guest lecture by Prof. Art Delcher). Sequence alignment, part 2: heuristic alignment methods including BLAST.

Reading:

Week 6, Oct. 15 and 17.

Thursday: guest lecture by Dr. Granger Sutton of The Institute for Genomic Research on whole-genome sequence assembly.

Tuesday: Sequencing by hybridization.

Reading:

Week 7, Oct. 23 and 24. This week we have two special seminars. There will be no class on Tuesday, Oct. 22. Instead, we have a special seminar on Wednesday, Oct. 23. We also have a special seminar on Thursday, Oct. 24.


SPECIAL SEMINAR on Wednesday, Oct. 23, the second in our Computational Biology Seminar Series. Temple Smith of Boston University will speak on "A Review of the Threading Approach to Inverse Protein Structure Prediction." The lecture is at 4:30pm in Shaffer Hall room 303.

SPECIAL SEMINAR on Thursday, Oct. 24, the third in our Computational Biology Seminar Series. Alejandro Schaffer of the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Institutes of Health will speak on "Parallel Genetic Linkage Analysis." The lecture is at 4:30pm in Shaffer Hall Room 3.


Week 8, Oct. 29 and 31. Algorithms for constructing amino acid substitution matrices. Introduction to Hidden Markov Models for sequence analysis.

Reading:

Week 9, Nov. 5 and 7. Genetic sequence and map databases and the Human Genome Project. This topic will be presented in a set of guest lectures by Prof. Stan Letovsky of the Division of Biomedical Information Sciences.


SPECIAL SEMINAR on Thursday, Nov. 7, the fourth in our Computational Biology Seminar Series. Christian Overton of the University of Pennsylvania will speak on "High-Throughput Annotation of Genomic Sequences." The lecture is at 4:30pm in Shaffer Hall Room 3.

Reading:

Week 10, Nov. 12 and 14. The Genome Data Base. (Continuation of Prof. Letovsky's lectures.)
SPECIAL SEMINAR on Thursday, Nov. 14, the fifth in our Computational Biology Seminar Series. Eugene Myers of the University of Arizona will speak on "Approaches to Whole Genome DNA Sequencing." The lecture is at 4:30pm in Shaffer Hall room 3.

Week 11, Nov. 19 and 21. On November 19 class will be replaced by a seminar in the Center for Language and Speech Processing. The seminar is at 4:30pm in Shaffer Hall room 100, by Prof. Alan Biermann of Duke University. The topic is "Goal-Oriented Multimedia Dialogue with Variable Initiative."

Nov 21: Final lecture by Prof. Letovsky, on computational models of morphogenesis.

Reading (for next week):

Week 12, Nov. 26. Guest lecture by Dr. Owen White of The Institute for Genomic Research on comparative genomics.

Reading:

Week 13, Dec. 3 and 5. Biological background on the structure of genes: exons, introns, and inter-genic DNA. Description of the gene finding problem. Computer systems for gene finding. Time permitting: DNA computing; molecular evolution.

Reading:

Assignments and grading

The grade will be based on problem sets, programming assignments, and either a final exam or final project. There are a total of six assigments which count for a total of 70% of the grade. The final exam accounts for the remaining 30%. With approval of the instructor, a final project may take the place of the final exam.

Useful resources for the course

Last year's (1995) syllabus
Home Page for Computational Biology at Hopkins
Home Page for Computer Science at Hopkins