42 KAM Mathematical Colloquium

Prof. MICHAEL WATERMAN

University of Southern California

A NEW APPROACH TO DNA SEQUENCE ASSEMBLY

June 1, 2001

Lecture Room S6, Charles University, Malostranske nam. 25, Praha 1 10:30 AM

Abstract

This lecture will cover computational aspects of DNA sequencing. Although this problem has been studied for 25 years, it continues to receive attention. As with many problems in computational biology, this work is at the intersection of molecular biology, biotechnology, statistics  and computing. The basic outline of most compuational approaches has three steps: overlap, layout, and consensus. The sizes of the  projects have dramatically increased recently with one already famous attempt to sequence the entire human genome in ``one pass''. This has made apparent  limitations of the current methods. Along with the standard methods, another quite different computational approach based on Eulerian graphs will be described.