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TUTORIAL I
Computational Methods in Bioinformatics
Sharmila S. Mande and M. Vidyasagar
Tata Consultancy Services

Audience: The tutorial is intended as an introduction to Bioinformatics to students and professionals with an IT background.

Course Description: Technological advances in life sciences have been generating an immense amount of data. Computational methods have been applied to decipher useful information contained therein. The synergy between computer science and life science thus has led to the birth of Bioinformatics. In this tutorial, we will cover the following topics: 1) Basic molecular biology - Cellular organization, structure of the cell, chromosomes, genes, DNA, RNA, proteins, DNA Replication, transcription, translation, challenges in biology, 2) Sequence analysis - Local and global similarity searches, pairwise and multiple sequence alignments, 3) Genome annotation and analysis - ORF prediction algorithms for prokaryotes and eukaryotes, pattern identification, RNA structure prediction, 4) Protein structure - Primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary structures, domains and motifs, secondary structure prediction methods, transmembrane prediction, various 3D modelling methods, and 5) Comparative genome analysis - Whole genome alignment, gene function identification.

Lecturers: Dr. Sharmila Mande heads the Bioinformatics Division at the Advanced Technology Centre of TCS. Her research interests are in comparative genomics, protein structure and protein-protein interactions. She received her Ph. D. from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 1991.

Dr. M. Vidyasagar is an Executive Vice President of TCS and heads the Advanced Technology Center in Hyderabad. His current research interests are statistical learning theory and the application of machine learning approaches to various problems in computational Biology. He received his Ph. D. from University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1969. He is the author of nine books and 130 journal articles, and has received several awards in recognition of his research.