Date:Wed, 30 Sep 2009
From:George Jay Tucker
Subject:SPAMS this Thursday, 5PM, 2-105
Hi everyone,

This week we have Alex explaining more awesome computational biology.  See below
for the abstract.  Dinner will follow in the applied math common room. See you
at the talk!

Remember to join the SPAM seminar mailing list by visiting
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/spamslist.

Best,
George

Speaker: Alex Levin

Title: RNAmutants: an algorithm for analyzing the RNA mutation landscape

Abstract: In recent years, biologists have started understanding the diverse and
important role that RNA molecules play in the cell.  They have discovered many
types of non-coding RNA's and have attempted to study their function.  A first
step to understanding the function of an RNA molecule is to understand its
secondary structure, and how this structure changes under mutations.  We will
describe a recent algorithm, RNAmutants, which is able to explore the mutation
landscape of RNA much more efficiently than previous approaches.  We will then
discuss the fun computational experiments one can do using the software.