Project 1
Project 1 is now posted, and is due on Monday, September 5 (8:59pm). Students will work in teams of two for Project 1, with constraints as discussed in Class 2: you can choose your partner or be assigned one “randomly” after class (today). If you choose your own partner, your team must satisfy these constraints:
- Both teammates went to different high schools
- Your answers to at least one of these questions must be different:
- What country were you born in?
- Have you taken any biology courses at UVA?
- Have you taken a Theory of Computation course?
Readings
(Repeated from Class 1)
Before Tuesday’s class, 30 August:
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Read Chapters 1 – 10 of Hubert’s The DNA Book (the chapters are very short and interesting, so its not as much as it sounds). To access the early version of this book that we have access to, you will need the login information from github discussions. (This link will work after you have joined the course github site, see above.)
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Read Chapter 3 (at least through the end of 3.8) of Bioinformatics Algorithms: How do we assemble genomes?. (This will be the focus of the first project, which is due on Monday, 5 September.
Slides
The slides are here: Class 2: Platform for Life on Earth
Some links to materials for the class:
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J. D. Watson and F. H. C. Crick. Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid [PDF]. Nature, 25 April 1953. (Also read: Sexism in science: did Watson and Crick really steal Rosalind Franklin’s data?, The Guardian, 23 June 2015.)
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F. Sanger, S. Nicklen, and A. R. Coulson. DNA sequencing with chain-terminating inhibitors [PDF]. Proceedings on the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, December 1977.
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This review paper gives some interesting explanations and analyses on why the codons are the way they are: Milton H. Saier, Understanding the Genetic Code, Journal of Bacteriology, August 2019. Publisher’s Link
Image from Saier's Paper