COMPUTATIONAL & COMPARATIVE GENOMICS
November 2 - 8, 2005
Application Deadline: July 15, 2005

Instructors:
William Pearson, University of Virginia, Charlottesville
Randall Smith, SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals, King of Prussia

Beyond BLAST and FASTA - This course presents a comprehensive overview of the theory and practice of computational methods for gene identification and characterization from DNA sequence data. The course focuses on approaches for extracting the maximum amount of information from protein and DNA sequence similarity through sequence database searches, statistical analysis, and multiple sequence alignment. Additional topics include gene recognition (exon/intron prediction), identifying signals in unaligned sequences, and integration of genetic and sequence information in biological databases. The course combines lectures with hands-on exercises; students are encouraged to pose challenging sequence analysis problems using their own data. The course makes extensive use of local WWW pages to present problem sets and the computing tools to solve them. Students use Windows and Mac workstations attached to a UNIX server; participants should be comfortable using the Unix operating system and a Unix text editor. The course is designed for biologists seeking advanced training in biological sequence analysis, computational biology core resource directors and staff, and for scientists in other disciplines, such as computer science, who wish to survey current research problems in biological sequence analysis.

The primary focus of the Computational Genomics course is the theory and practice of algorithms used in computational biology, with the goal of using current methods more effectively and developing new algorithms. Students more interested in the practical aspects of advanced software development are encouraged to apply to course on Advanced Bioinformatics.

Speakers in the 2004 course included:
Stephen Altschul, National Library of Medicine
Ewan Birney, EMBL-EBI
Peter Cooper, NCBI/NLM
Edward Rubin, Joint Genome Institute, Lawrence Berkeley Lab
Lincoln Stein, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Mark Yandell, HHMI/University of California, Berkeley

This course is supported by the National Human Genome Research Institute