Computer Science | Grinnell College

Thursday, November 3, 2016
4:15 p.m. in Science 3821
Refreshments at 4:00 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Science 3817)

Xiaoqiu Huang, Professor of Computer Science at Iowa State University, will present "Developing and using bioinformatics tools for analysis of big DNA sequence data."

Recent advances in next-generation sequencing technology provide an opportunity to develop and use bioinformatics tools for analysis of big DNA sequence data in order to further our understanding of living systems at the molecular level. In this talk, Huang will describe his recent work in developing and using bioinformatics tools to further our understanding of how genetic variation is generated in an asexual plant pathogen.

Huang's previous research interests include development of computer algorithms and software for reconstruction of genome sequences and for finding genes and other functional elements in genomes. He is currently interested in understanding evolutionary processes by applying these computer programs to big data sets of genomic DNA sequences. He is the author of a widely used CAP3 assembly program. He and his collaborators have developed a whole-genome assembly program named PCAP. PCAP has been used by Washington University Genome Center in chimpanzee and chicken genome projects.

On Thursday, December 3, Giang Nguyen 2017 will describe her summer internship on bioinformatics, inferring phylogenetic relationships from protein and DNA sequences.

At 4:00 p.m., refreshments will be served in the Computer Science Commons. The talk, “Bioinformatics Research Internship at Michigan State University,” will begin at 4:15 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!

On Thursday, 17 November 2011, Jillian Goetz '10 will join us for an informal CS extra. Jillian, who is in her second year in a graduate program in bioinformatics, will talk about the transition from Grinnell to graduate school and will answer questions students have about her experiences in applying to graduate school, starting graduate programs, and working in an interdisciplinary field.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). An informal discussion will continue at 4:30 p.m. in the same location. Everyone is welcome to attend.

On Thursday, November 19, Christopher K. Tuggle, Professor of Molecular Genetics in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Graduate Program at Iowa State University, will present a talk discussing

a variety of computational problems and projects in biology that are being explored at Iowa State, including the open-source Integrated Animal Annotation and Microarray Expression Database (ANEXdb).

He will also discuss features of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Graduate Program.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). Professor Tuggle's talk, Computational problems in biology, will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821.

The original Exploring Bioinformatics uses Perl as its primary programming language. Why are we making the switch to Python? For a number of reasons.

• Evidence suggests that Python is easier to learn than Perl.
• Python is typically used in an interactive style, which seems more natural for many of the explorations.
• Python is seeing increasing use in Bioinformatics.

An attempt to put the Exploring Bioinformatics with Python material into Drupal form.