Special Topics in Computational Molecular Biology: Post Genomic Algorithms

The recent publications of the genomic sequence of large Eukaryotic mammals [4, 7] are a landmark for Molecular Biology. The whole genome sequence is a natural starting point for many investigations, and these papers contain a tantalizing glimpse into the biology of the future. It is also remarkable, and usually overlooked, that most of the conclusions in these papers were based on a computational analysis of the genomic data, using tools developed by the Computational Biology community over the last twenty years. It is not an exaggeration to say that in much of modern biology, computation will be an essential first step, helping generate hypotheses that can be settled by more refined experiments. In this course, then, we investigate some of the questions that arise from the initial look at genomic data, and ask if they can be settled with post-genomic algorithms. We list some of these topics below, but they may change depending on the interest of the participants.