CS791AA Computational Methods in Structural Molecular
Biology (Spring 2005)
This is a seminar on Structural Biology and Robotics.
Recently, techniques from robotics have been applied
successfully to the area of molecular and structural
biology. The seminar explores the connections between
those two fields by presenting a mixture of necessary
background knowledge from both fields and current
publications exploring their relationship.
The idea is to form small interdisciplinary teams that
explore onging research crossing the boundary between
these two fields.
No prior knowledge in biology or robotics is required.
Students will give presentations about the various
topics listed in the syllabus. Presentations will be
prepared and held by small groups, hopefully
consisting of a computer scientist and somebody who's
en expert in biology or biochemistry.
In these presentations it is very important to:
clearly define the biological question,
explain the relevant biological concepts to
computer scientists,
clearly identify how computational methods can
help,
explain the relevant computational concepts
to biologists,
provide an overview over the different
computational techniques,
talk about the one or two most interesting ones
in more detail, and
if possible, propose a new idea (you will be
surprised how easy that is in this wide-open field).
Presentations will be highly interactive, so you will
have to be prepared to answer questions.
Every presentation requires to meetings with me
(Oliver), one before you start, to discuss the general
direction and to talk about some of the more important
papers, and one at least one week prior to your
presentation, in which we will go over a rough draft
of the slides. At that point, you should also pick
2-3 papers that everybody will read in preparation of
your presentation.
