Free public lecture on computer science

The second in the series of free public Gibbons lectures takes place this Thursday 12th May at 6:30pm. This week's lecture, titled: Finding your place in the genome: assembly, annotation, association, is given by Prof. Thomas Lumley of the Department of Statisticsat  The University of Auckland. To an extent that would have been astonishing a century ago, DNA copying and transcription turns out to be a digital process. The copying mechanism allows tiny amounts of DNA to be amplified; the base-pairing of the double helix lets us read out a sequence, usually by adding fluorescent tags to the DNA bases. With three billion letters of genome, much of which is poorly understood, computers need to do nearly all the work. The talk will discuss three areas of IT involvement - DNA sequencing, annotation (looking up what is known or can be guessed about a stretch of genome) and association studies (relating differences in the DNA sequence to differences in biology and health). More details about the talk, time and venue are here. If you were unable to attend last week's lecture it can be streamed from here.