General information

Course Logistics

Prerequisites and Grading

Grading: Your grade will be based on two parts: 3 homework assignments, literature review, and discussion in three research Showcase lectures. There are no credit given for attending other lectures. There are no exams and no quizzes.

Homework assigments: Only written assignments, no programming assignments. Submit to Canvas.

Research Showcase: 45-minute invited presentation about ongoing computational biology research by Allen School PhD students and the instructor. The instructor will then lead the discussion about the limitation, potential improvement and future directions.

Late Policy: We will allow 3 total late days. If an assignment is submitted late and this exceeds your 3 late days, that assignment will receive 0 credit. Late days may be spread over any number of assignments, but the total number may not exceed 3. Late days are rounded up so that an assignment that is 28 hours late accumulated 2 late days.

Schedule

ORCA
Date Content Reading Slides Assignments
Basics
9/25 Welcome/overview. Introduction to computational biology. Molecular Biology for Computer Scientists
Central dogma (10 mins)
Transcription/translation
Yu, Michael Ku, et al. "Translation of genotype to phenotype by a hierarchy of cell subsystems." Cell systems 2.2 (2016): 77-88.
slides
Sequence
9/30 Sequence aligment and analysis (Part 1)
A survey of best practices for RNA-seq data analysis.
TopHat2: accurate alignment of transcriptomes in the presence of insertions, deletions and gene fusions.
10/2 Sequence aligment and analysis (Part 2) Deep-learning language models help to improve protein sequence alignment . HW1 is here
10/7 Protein function prediction (part 1) Protein family classification slides
10/9 Protein function prediction (part 2)
Graph to Sequence Alignment CAFA4 CAFA3 CAFA2
Graph (systems biology)
10/14 Introduction to biomedical graph analysis (part 1) Graphs in molecular biology slides hw 2 is here
10/16 Research showcase (Wei Qiu, generative AI for aging research)
10/21 Introduction to biomedical graph analysis (part 2)
10/23 Research showcase (Zixuan Liu, generative AI for retinal imaging analysis) RETFound
OCTCube
10/28 Biomedical graph diffusion (part 1) Network-based tumor stratification
Supervised network-based tumor stratification
slides HW1 due
10/30 Research showcase (Hanwen Xu, generative AI for cancer pathology)
11/4 Biomedical graph diffusion (part 2)
11/6 Research showcase (Yongkang Li, generative AI for label-free mouse brain imaging) Cell Painting
11/11 UW Holiday, no class, Veterans Day
Genomics
11/13 Research showcase (Shengqi Hang, generative AI for chromatin structure analysis) HW2 due!
11/18 Genomics for precision medicine Towards precision medicine slides HW3 is here
11/20 Research showcase (Chanwoo Kim, interpretable AI for pathology data analysis) MONET
11/25 Research showcase (Sheng Wang, generative AI for Medicine)
12/2 Research showcase (Patricia Xiao, generative AI for cardiovascular disease analysis) AI for cardiovascular
12/4 Research showcase (Tangqi Fang, generative AI for genomic data analysis) Literature review and HW3 are due on Dec 10th!