Computaional biology
by
Mikhail Gelfand
Moscow

We have now the (draft) human genome, genomes of drosophila, nematode, plant, and two different yeasts, as well as more than 50 bacterial genomes. What do we do with this wealth of data? Can we gain any insight into the organism's life by just loking on the string of symbols representing its genome? Can computational analysis supplement, ot even substitute experiment?

I will present an overview of current approaches to functional annotation of genomes, that is, extracting biological knowledge from genomics DNA sequences. This covers: recognition of genes (protein-coding regions) in genomics DNA sequences, prediction of protein function given sequences, metabolic reconstruction, that is, reconstructing the organism's physiology given the set of proteins, and, finally, prediction of regulatory interactions between proteins and DNA.

I will try to explain the main ideas of the comparative genomics, rather than the technical details. I will also mention some mathematical problems arising in this area, although the plan is to talk more about (computational) biology and less about (biology-inspired) mathematics.

Anyhow, I hope that at the end, the participants will get some idea about the modern field of computaional biology, a.k.a. bioinformatics, arising at the interface of molecular biology, mathematics, and computer science.

Date received: May 9, 2002