Workshop details

Genome sequencing projects created a vast collection of DNA sequences over the past years. In order to characterize such genomes, one of the initial steps is to identify the structural elements that build up a genome collection. Sequence alignment and database search are fundamental techniques for the identification of DNA, RNA and amino acid sequences as will be discussed in this workshop.

Learning objectives

• Learn the importance of sequence comparison for Bioinformatics;

• Understand the concepts of homology and how important this is for sequence alignment;

• Compare global vs. local alignments;

• Explore diverse substitution matrices;

• Familiarize with major sequence alignment algorithms;

• Understand the statistical significance of sequence alignments.

Syllabus

• Fundaments of sequence comparison;

• Evolutionary basis of sequence comparison;

• Similarity versus Homology;

• Types of mutation;

• Global vs. Local alignments;

• Modular nature of proteins;

• Dot-matrices;

• Optimal alignment methods;

• The Needleman-Wunsch algorithm;

• The Smith-Waterman Algorithm;

• Substitution Scores and Gap Penalties;

• PAM and BLOSUM Matrices;

• Affine gap penalty;

• Statistical Significance of Alignments.

Format

• Zoom live webinar: 1h live webinar with pre-recorded presentation split in two sessions of 30min each with a break of 5min between them. Attendees are welcome to join asynchronous live group discussion (Q&A) with the speaker on Discord during and after the scheduled session.

• General discussion session: 1h Q&A recurrent pre-dated session booked for attendees of multiple slots of this workshop.

• Recorded presentation: Attendees registering using a Google e-mail account, will have private access to the recorded webinars.

• Certificate: all attendees checking-in and out of both 30min sessions will be entitled to receive a certificate of participation (PDF/PNG) that can be shared on your social media with credentials (QR-code) that can be verified on our website, with an option (extra fee) to register as a NFT asset with an unique address on the Ethereum blockchain.