Professor Eskko Ukkonen will present a plenary lecture reflecting on his views concerning the role of computation in biology.   The lecture will be followed by a cocktail party.

The lecture and the following cocktail service are free of charge and open to all interested. However, in order to assess the number of participants, please register for the event by Tuesday 30 September at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ClbESIE24743IKOR3b1e5d4rwambX2ak4VaMqAsAUGM/viewform

Abstract

Since the invention of DNA sequencing in the 1970’s, the analysis of molecular biological sequences has been an inspiring source of computational problems, and even a computing machine using DNA molecules has been proposed. Unlike most data in natural sciences, the biological sequence data such as DNA and amino acid sequences is discrete rather than continuous by nature. Hence biological sequence analysis is, in addition to fields like text processing and information retrieval, another natural application area of combinatorial algorithms for strings (stringology). A new discipline, called bioinformatics or computational biology has emerged. With the advent of high-throughput sequencing the amount of sequence data has exploded, making molecular biology research totally dependent on efficient computation. The talk will discuss, also from historical and paradigmatic perspective, some computational problems, algorithmic techniques and future goals of bioinformatics, ranging from the genome reconstruction and sequence indexing to the analysis of gene regulation.