2025-26 - COMP3212 - Computational Biology

Modern biology poses many challenging problems for the computer scientists. Rapid growth in instrumentation, and our ability to archive and distribute vast amounts of data, has significantly changed the way we attempt to understand cellular function, and the way we seek to treat complex diseases. Data from biology comes in various forms: nucleotide and amino-acid sequences, macromolecular structures, measurements from high-throughput experiments and curated literature in the form of publications and functional annotations. It is nowadays widely acknowledged that computational modelling will play a key role in extracting useful information from vast amounts of such diverse types of data. The computational challenges faced by the human genome project and Alan Turing’s contribution to morphogenesis are classic examples of such roles.