Topics will include (incomplete - open to student input):

• What is life? (phage and viruses as part of a living system)
• evolution as algorithm
• sequence space
• databank searches
• Entrez at the NCBI
• evolution of the universe
• prebiotic evolution, the origin of life
• self-replicating biopolymers, the RNA-world,
• in vitro selection, experimental evolution
• from single genes to metabolic networks and hypercycles, exon/domain shuffling,
• gene duplications
• biochemical innovation
• alignment of nucleotide and amino acid sequences (pairwise and multiple; global and local)
• Detecting divergent homologs using PSI blast
• molecular trees (phylogenetic reconstructions)
• species concepts
• introns, inteins, molecular parasites, homing
• selfish genes, selfish operons
• analyses of complete genomes
• comparative genome analyses
• inspection and comparison of protein structures, convergence versus common ancestry
• alignment of protein structures
• lateral and vertical inheritance
• horizontal gene transfer
• co-evolution
• evolution of complexity
• networks (small world networks, interaction networks, hubs, the rich get richer)
• microarrays

Last modified: August 18, 2008