Computational Biology Branch (CBB) is the research branch of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), National Librafy of Medicine (NLM), National Institutes of Health (NIH).

We hold weekly seminars by CBB members each Tuesday at 11 AM in the Building 38A B2 NCBI Library. Visitors' presentations usually take place in the same room, but are scheduled on a different day of the week.

To schedule a seminar, please click on the appropriate date in the calendar.

Contact Ivan Ovcharenko with questions or if you need help in scheduling a seminar.

About CBB

Affiliation: National Cancer Institute
Host: Eugene Koonin
Information theory and molecular biology
“Information theory has been applied to molecular biology since 1958 when Yockey, Platzman and Quastler published papers presented at a meeting on the topic. Since then, many attempts have been made to integrate the two subjects. In this talk I will give a semi-historical account of my work starting with the analysis of DNA binding sites which is now widely used as the sequence logo graphic. The logo shows an average picture for a set of sites. This leads to the next graphical technique, sequence walkers, that display the information for individual binding sites. These techniques are quite useful for exploring genomes. The big question, though, is how the information is related to the binding energy. The upper bound on bits per joule is given by the second law of thermodynamics. But when one looks at actual binding sites they do not reach the bound, they only use 70% of the binding energy to make selections. I present my work on explaining why this 70% efficiency appears in many molecular interactions. I promise there will be a really cool surprise at the end about exactly (to 3 decimal places) why the genetic code is degenerate!“

Genome-wide mapping and computational analysis of non-B DNA structures in vivo

Genomics of human gene expression

All Seminars