Alexander Bolshoy

University of Haifa

"Words and Codes in 'DNA Language'"

Abstract

I am one of the authors of A. Bolshoy et al. "Genome Clustering: from linguistics models to classification of genetic texts." (Springer-Verlag, 2010). Also I taught courses named "DNA Linguistics" and "Sequence Biology (Genetic Codes)" among other less "exotic" courses. I would like to share my knowledge and experience regarding these issues. In this review I would like to discuss definitions of "a word in a genetic text" and "a genetic code". The objective is to bring your attention to similarities and dissimilarities between human and genetic texts. The presentation is constructed of definitions used by different researchers and of many examples to illustrate a notion of "Multiple genetic codes".

 

 

Focus: Genome structure and evolution

Subject: comparative genomics, molecular evolution, computational virology, machine-learning algorithms for sequence analysis

Research Interests:

• Molecular Evolution
  • Revealing evolutionary factors affecting gene length in prokaryotes.
  • Evolutionary factors affecting exon-intron structure
• Evolution of RNA viruses.
  • Overlapping Codes in RNA Viral Genomes
  • Interplay between conservation and variability (in HIV-1): 
• DNA Information.
  • DNA linguistics.
  • How to measure information contained in DNA texts.