Finding Mutations in DNA and Proteins (Bioinformatics VI)

Welcome to our class! We are glad that you decided to join us.

In this class, we will consider the following two central biological questions (the computational approaches needed to solve them are shown in parentheses):

1. How Do We ...
2. Week 2 - Week 2: The Burrows-Wheeler Transform
   

   Welcome to week 2 of the class!

   This week, we will introduce a paradigm called the Burrows-Wheeler transform; after seeing how it can be used in string compression, we will demonstrate that it is also the foundation of modern read-mapping algorithms...

3. Week 3 - Week 3: Speeding Up Burrows-Wheeler Read Mapping
   

   Welcome to week 3 of class!

   Last week, we saw how the Burrows-Wheeler transform could be applied to multiple pattern matching. This week, we will speed up our algorithm and generalize it to the case that patterns have errors, which models the biolo...

4. Week 4 - Week 4: Introduction to Hidden Markov Models
   

   Welcome to week 4 of class!

   This week, we will start examining the case of aligning sequences with many mutations -- such as related genes from different HIV strains -- and see that our problem formulation for sequence alignment is not adequate for ...

5. Week 5 - Week 5: Profile HMMs for Sequence Alignment
   

   Welcome to week 5 of class!

   Last week, we introduced hidden Markov models. This week, we will see how hidden Markov models can be applied to sequence alignment with a profile HMM. We will then consider some advanced topics in this area, which are ...

6. Week 6 - Week 6: Bioinformatics Application Challenge
   

   Welcome to the sixth and final week of class!

   This week brings our Application Challenge, in which we apply the HMM sequence alignment algorithms that we have developed.