Aims
To describe methods, problems and results in the analysis of the structural information in protein and DNA sequences.
Contents
What are the data and the main problems? Pairwise comparison (alignment). Comparison of many sequences (multiple alignment). Database search. Statistical significanse of sequence similarities. Weight matrices for amino acids. RNA secondary structure prediction - energy minimization (basepairing maximization) and coupled substitutions. The prediction of protein secondary structure. The Protein Foldning Problem: Teoretical models and empirical results. Homology modelling: given two (or more) homologous sequences, where only one of the structures of the sequences is known, what can then be said about the structure of the other proteins? Comparison of tertiary protein structures. Comparison of RNA-secondary structures. Combined structure-prediction and structure comparison. Docking: Does two given structures fit into each other? Does a sequence fit a structure (threading)?
Prerequisites: Broad background in biology
Teachers: Jotun Hein (person in charge) and invited quest lectures. For further information, please contact: jotun@pop.bio.aau.dk
Limit on number of attendees: 24
Evaluation
Written take-home assignment.
Text-books
Primary literature.
Additional remarks
This course is primarily organized for Ph.D. students and these will be given first priority in cases of limited capacity. Graduate and postgraduate students that wish to audit the lectures without receiving course credit are invited and encouraged to do so. Teaching is in English except in cases where the instructors and all participants are Danish speaking.
ECTS-credits
10
Semester
Fall