Lecture 1

Aims

• To place bioinformatics in a wider context.
• To introduce the basic principles of pairwise sequence alignment.

Objectives

After this lecture you will be able to:

• discuss a range of experimental methods, the kinds of data that these generate, and examples of biological questions that these can help to address.
• describe and compute of simple measures of sequence similarity;
• describe the relationship between dotplots and sequence alignments;
• describe and apply a dynamic programming algorithm to find an optimal pairwise sequence alignment;
• describe the difference between global and local alignment algorithms.

Supplementary Material

Some of the lecture slides are available on-line (one per page, four-per-page).

Matlab program for pairwise global sequence alignment (local access).

Web-based programs illustrating topics from the lecture:

• Dotplot
• Global Alignment
• Local Alignment