BCH441 Final Exam
Exam Principles
This is a collection of questions from final exams through the years. It is not comprehensive, and, since the course emphasis is slightly different each year, not all questions would have been covered in class every year. This collection is not an archive - the questions have been edited for clarity wherever appropriate and some parts that I would find less relevant today have been omitted. I think that the questions in this collection are thus going to be more useful and more relevant than copies of old exam questions.
The goal of the exam is to probe your understanding of key concepts and your skills in key procedures of bioinformatics. There is (I hope) only a bare minimum of pure memorization involved, mostly concerning the questions in the Amino Acids section. The other sections of the exam concern skills of interpreting molecular models, in particular stereo vision, and the judicious use of databases and procedures. A critical analysis of applications is another focus.
I have not provided model answers because I feel the actual answers would distract from your work with the questions. The goal here is not to know the answer but to master the process of identifying evidence and integrating it.
Amino Acids
Of all data abstractions in bioinformatics, the one-letter amino acid code is the most important one. Whether you are evaluating multiple sequence alignments, database searches or mutational studies, this all requires a confident understanding of the physicochemical nature of the residues you are considering and of course knowing which letters correspond to which amino acids...
Stereo Vision
Molecules are three-dimensional entities and stereo-vision of images on paper and on the screen is one of the most powerful, intuitive ways to appreciate that. We have practiced stero-vision in this course; here are a number of situations that require spatial awareness...
Databases
One aspect of Bioinformatics concerns itself with the storage, organisation, and retreival of biological information. The questions in this section consider the contents and use of some of the key abstractions (sequences, structures, graphs ...) that we deal with, and the databases we store them in.
Tools
Another aspect of bioinformatics concerns algorithms: computational tools that allow us to analyse the data and support our inferences...
Applications
Bioinformatics and computational biology are huge and growing areas of active research with a dynamic array of subspecialities - phylogenetic analysis has advanced in leaps and bounds with the availablity of molecular data, genomic-, transcriptomic-, proteomic and other cross-sectional views are slowly beginning to unravel some of the intricacies of the cell's inner workings, predictive models for molecular medicine and bioengineering may help shape our society's future. These tasks are what motivates bioinformatics worldwide, seeking to develp novel ways to reason about biology...
