Assignments
All assignments are due on November 23rd, 2011. The easiest is that you send men your report/program by e-mail.
There are five options for this assignment: please only choose one; I prefer that you do very well on one assignment than reasonable well on two assignments! Do not under-estimate yourself: if you a novice programmer but are interested in working on a programming assignment, please choose the "soft" option. If however you are a skilled programmer, choose the "medium" or "hard" option (these are just labels...all options should require equivalent work if we factor in your current skills).
The first two options do not require programming:
- Option 1 has three different "small" problems, covering different aspect of bioinformatics
- Option 2 is more a writing assignment: you are asked to write a review on a distributed computing approach to solving the protein folding problem, namely Folding@home
The following three options each require some level of programming:
- Option 3 involves writing a program that "translates" a DNA sequence into the equivalent protein sequence
- Option 4 relates to computing the volume of a biomolecule
- Option 5 involves implementing a method that is able to detect knots in proteins.
| Option | Title | Programming knowledge | Handout | Supplementary information |
| 1 | Analyzing a protein marker of a genetic disease | None | Handout: Word document or PDF | |
| 2 | Writing a review paper on Folding@Home | None | Handout: Word document or PDF | Paper on the folding of NTL9 |
| 3 | Writing a DNA sequence to Protein sequence converter | "Soft" | Handout: Word document or PDF | |
| 4 | Computing the volume of a molecule | "Medium" | Handout: Word document or PDF | Test file: Volume.crd (the expected volume is 35490.34) A review paper on the importance of geometry for studying biomolecular solvation |
| 5 | Detecting knots in proteins | "Advanced" | Handout: Word document or PDF | Review paper on the importance of knots in proteins Original paper describing the method for detecting knots Two proteins that contain knots: 1yvel.crd and 1zncA.crd Two proteins that should not contain knots: 1timA.crd and 5pti.crd |