Lectures

Seminar information archive ~03/28Next seminarFuture seminars 03/29~


2012/03/21

15:15-17:00   Room #123 (Graduate School of Math. Sci. Bldg.)
R. Penner (Aarhus/Caltech)
Moduli space techniques in computational biology
(ENGLISH)
[ Abstract ]
Basic fatgraph models of RNA and protein will be discussed, where edges are associated with base pairs in the former case and with hydrogen bonds between backbone atoms in the latter. For RNA, this leads to new methods described by context-free grammars of RNA folding prediction including certain classes of pseudo-knots. For protein, beyond these discrete invariants lie continuous ones which associate a rotation of
3-dimensional space to each hydrogen bond linking a pair of peptide units. Histograms of these rotations over the entire database of proteins exhibit a small number of "peptide unit legos" which can be used to advantage for the protein folding problem.