Computing for Biology

Both the quality and quantity of data available for life scientists are improving at an unprecedented pace. This requires strong efforts from theorists to catch up with and calls for a new discipline: computational biology, the study of biology using notions from quantitative sciences. Students are going to tackle biologically motivated problems using methods from mathematics and computer science. How can the function of a protein be predicted from its amino acid sequence? How can we tell when the common ancestor of two species lived from their DNA sequences? How can we identify drug targets in a network of interacting proteins? We are going to work these and similar problems, applying basic concepts of computational biology. The module is largely based on independent work of the students in the form of homework and projects.