The discipline of Mathematical Biology has been around for a while. The study of population dynamics, a dominant part of this discipline, for example, began more than 200 years back. Computational Biology or Bioinformatics (the dividing line is somewhat hazy) however is a relatively new discipline. The genesis can be traced to the need for efficient computational tools to analyse the vast amounts of data that biologists started generating using high-throughput technologies, like microarray analysis for example.
For computer scientists this opened up a goldmine of problems to which to apply sophisticated algorithmic tools and facilitate new insights into the biological problems. Thus, for example, BLAST was born, a powerful tool for searching in DNA databases and the human genome was sequenced.
In this course, we shall explore the algorithmic tools that have been used to solve problems arsing in DNA sequence analysis, restriction site mapping, sequence alignment, construction of evolutionary trees, motif-finding, predicting CG-rich islands etc. Each of these problem domains will be used to highlight the application of a particular algorithmic tool.
While opening an window into the world of biology, this course will also help in consolidating your grasp of the algorithmic tools you learnt about in a purely algorithms course, while at the same time convincing you of the practical utility of these tools.