Nov - Holger Hoos

Speaker: Holger Hoos

Talk Title: Building with Bases – Computational Design of RNAs

Event Details

Date/Time:

November 9, 2006, 6:00pm

Affiliation: Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, UBC

URL: Holger Hoos

Presentation: Download

Abstract:

Computational methods for designing biomolecules with specific properties play an increasingly prominent role in bioinformatics, nanotechnology and molecular therapeutics. RNAs are particularly interesting in this context, since despite their relatively simple chemical structure, they can form a huge number of different shapes and perform a wide variety of important functions. This talk is focussed on the RNA secondary structure design problem, in which the objective is to design RNA strands that form particular basepairing interactions within themselves, and also cover several interesting generalisations of this problem. I will explain the computational challenges encountered in solving these problems and outline algorithmic approaches for overcoming these challenges. The general method used for solving RNA design problems, stochastic local search, has important applications in many other areas of bioinformatics, some of which will also be briefly mentioned.

—

---

Student Speaker: Nels Thorsteinson, Research and Training Center on Bioinformatics,

Institute for Information Transmission Problems, Russian Academy of Sciences

Talk Title: An investigation of conserved coexpression in bacteria.

Presentation: Download

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.