Overview of the course program

Biological sequence databases: history, catalog of current databases, organisation of database entries, entry identification and retrieval (accession numbers, PIDs and GIDs), storage and updating, evolution to adapt to new technologies (EST, STS and genome-wide sequencing).

Analysis of single nucleic acid sequences: from restriction map to gene structure prediction

Analysis of single protein sequences: from compositional analysis to 3-D structure prediction

Pairwise comparisons: dot plots and one-to-one alignment strategies, analysis of sequence similarities

Comparisons to databases: hardware and software strategies for generating and analysing very large numbers of pairwise alignments (BLAST)

Multiple alignments: methods for detecting similarities within a family

Patterns, profiles and their extensions: generating an accurate description of a sequence motif and testing for its presence in a test sequence (Psi-BLAST, Pftools and other)

Putting it all together: getting the most out of molecular sequence data