12 weeks of coursework, weekly online assignments, 2 in-person invigilated quizzes, 1 in-person invigilated end term exam.
For details of standard course structure and assessments, visit
Academics
page.
WEEK 1
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Why computational biology?
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WEEK 2
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Where in the Genome Does DNA Replication Begin? - Algorithmic warmup (frequent exact/inexact k-mers in a string).
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WEEK 3
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Which DNA Patterns Play the Role of Molecular Clocks? - Randomized Algorithms (randomized motif search, Gibbs sampling).
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WEEK 4
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How Do We Assemble Genomes? - Graph Algorithms (Eulerian paths, de Bruijn graphs).
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WEEK 5
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How Do We Compare Biological Sequences? - Dynamic Programming (edit distance, single/multiple sequence alignment).
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WEEK 6
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Which Animal Gave Us SARS? - Evolutionary Tree Reconstruction (distance-based phylogeny, neighbor-joining algorithm).
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WEEK 7
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How Did Yeast Become a Winemaker? - Clustering Algorithms (hard and soft k-means).
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WEEK 8
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How Do We Locate Disease-Causing Mutations? - Combinatorial Pattern Matching (suffix trees/arrays, Burrows-Wheeler transform).
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WEEK 9
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Why Have Biologists Still Not Developed an HIV Vaccine? - Hidden Markov Models (Viterbi and forward–backward algorithms).
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WEEK 10
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Was T. rex Just a Big Chicken? - Computational Proteomics (peptide identification and spectral match).
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WEEK 11
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Which Motifs Are Hidden in a Biological Network? - Randomized Algorithms (colour coding for long paths in graphs).
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