2. Genes and proteins

Welcome back to our course on genomes and algorithms that is a computer analysis ofgenetic information. Last week we introduced the very basic concept in biology that is cell, DNA, genome, genes

The notion of gene emerged withthe works of Gregor Mendel. Mendel studied the inheritance on some traits like the shape of pea plant seeds,through generations. He stated the famous laws of inheritance

Genes code for proteins. What is the correspondence betweenthe genes, DNA sequences, and the structure of proteins? The correspondence isthe genetic code. Proteins have indeedsequences of amino acids.

We have seen that the genetic codeis a correspondence between the DNA or RNA sequences and aminoacid sequences that is proteins. Our aim here is to design atranslation algorithm, we make the

Remember we were designing our translation algorithm and since we are a bit lazy, we decided to make the hypothesis that there was the adequate function forimplementing the genetic code. It's now time

By writing the Lookup GeneticCode Function, we completed our translation algorithm. So we may ask the question about the algorithm, does it terminate? Andthe answer is yes, obviously. Is it pertinent,

We saw how to increase the efficiencyof our algorithm through the introduction of a data structure. Now let's see if we can do even better. We had a table of index and weexplain how the use of these

During the last session, I explained several times how it was important to increase the efficiency of sequences processing algorithm because sequences arevery long and there are large volumes of

Sequencing is anexponential technology. The progresses in this technologyallow now to a sequence whole genome, complete genome. What does it mean? Well let'stake two examples: some twenty years ago,

Getting the sequence of the genome is only the beginning, as I explained, once you have the sequence what you want to do is to locate the gene, to predict the function of the gene and maybe study the