J. Cohen
Le Jeudi 25 Mai 2000 à 14h30
Salle de Conférences du LIX, École Polytechnique
J. Cohen
Brandeis University, Waltham, Ma, USA
A view of bioinformatics
Résumé/Abstract :
The purpose of this presentation is to introduce to computer scientists
the goals of the relatively new discipline called bioinformatics I will
first review the basic biological mechanisms of a cell that are
important for its survival. I will then describe a few computer science
problems that have been solved to help biologists in their quest of
sequencing DNA, determining the shape of RNA and proteins, and making
hypothesis about cell regulation and metabolism. An implicit ultimate
motivation for bioinformatics is to pave the way for a reliable
cell-behavior-simulation using computers.
The talk is directed to computer scientists who would like to have a
birds-eye-view of bioinformatics. I will describe research being
currently done in gene finding, exon-intron determination, RNA
structure, inverse protein folding and gene regulation using biochips. I
will also review some of the tools currently used in solving
bioinformatic problems, such as grammars and parsing, alignments, Hidden
Markov Models (HMMs), machine learning, etc. A novel part of the
presentation is to show that non-deterministic grammars can be used to
generate DAGs based on which one can solve interesting optimization
problems using dynamic programming.
No knowledge of biology is assumed but biologists are welcome (provided
they can bear with the initial short intro to molecular biology).