Lecture 01

Update Warning! This page has not been revised yet for the 2007 Fall term. Some of the slides may be reused, but please consider the page as a whole out of date as long as this warning appears here.

 

 

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Lecture Slides

Slide 001

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Bioinformatics is not only required to master the quantitative aspects of the post-genomic era in molecular biology, it is a qualitative change in our approach to biology as well.

Slide 002

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Bioinformatics can be viewed as the science that develops between the two poles of data management and computational modeling of life.

Slide 003

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From its beginning, it was recognized that molecular biology is an information science, just as much as a molecular science. The abstractions and models that focus on the essence of this information, rather than on the details of its representation, have proven to be remarkably powerful in explaining the basic features of life, such as inheritance, self-organization and the process of evolution.

Slide 004

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The promises of genome analysis include harnessing the power of self assembly towards a bio-nanotechnologic revolution: growth, rather than manufacturing. This includes the vision of regenerative molecular medicine, essentially relegating disease to the dark past ages of ignorance. But while the information for a complete specification of life is undoubtedly present in the genome, life realizes itself in complex interactions between context-dependent components. This makes life essentially unpredictable, at least to our current approaches. The sheer volume of data is a comparatively minor obstacle.

Slide 005

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The current emphasis on -omic sciences creates novel challenges both in the quantity as well as the quality of scientific enquiry. The scale has become larger; molecular components are analyzed not in isolation but in their associations;comparison between genes within and across species is a major source of new insight and the absence of particular components and features is just as informative as their presence. However the availability technology should not lead to a purely methods-driven agenda.

Slide 006

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The US National Center of Biotechnology Information is one of the world's major centres for molecular data.

Slide 007

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The PDB (Protein structure DataBase) is the world's central repository for 3D structural data of proteins and nucleic acids.

Slide 008

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KEGG (the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes) is one of a group of data resources that focus on the functional relationships of the components of biological systems. Note that sequences, structures and functions are complementary aspects of the same molecular entities. Cross-referencing between databases and ensuring consistency is a major challenge and task of biological datat management.

Slide 009

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On one hand, we can conclude that biological data management is what bioinformatics is all about. On the other hand, bioinformatics as a science is a way to study biology. And this aspect - which I like to refer to as "Computational Biology" - is not well described by data management. It has a lot more to do with modeling, and the question of understanding biology.

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Slide 011

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Tying ties may be at first an intimidatingly imprecise task, and indeed irrelevant. (Half of North Americans are not eligible to wear a tie, even to formal occasions, and those of the other half who are not working in a bank will maybe wear a tie on only two occasions and have the tie tied for them on the second one. Tying ties is, alas, a cultural technique that appears to be on the decline.). But it is a nice example for abstracting a complicated process down to its essential principles, and reasoning formally about these principles to obtain rigorous results about the process.

Here is an example of a systematic, albeit informal description of the process of how to tie a tie. But why is the process divided into exactly these steps? Are all of them necessary? How do we describe this process so that we can remember it ? Or do we need to refer to the sequence of images every time we would like to tie this knot? Is this a simple, or a rather complicated way to tie a tie; are there others? Are there better ways to tie a tie, and what could better even mean?

Slide 012

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The triangular lattice walk transposes the problem from your neck into the domain of mathematics !

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