Averages arise everywhere. In sports, we want to project the average number of games that a team is expected to win; in gambling, we want to project the average losses incurred playing blackjack; in business, companies want to calculate their average expected sales for the next quarter.
Tag Archives: rosalind
Overlap Graphs
Networks arise everywhere in the practical world, especially in biology. Networks are prevalent in popular applications such as modeling the spread of disease, but the extent of network applications spreads far beyond popular science.
Mortal Fibonacci Rabbits
In “Rabbits and Recurrence Relations”, we mentioned the disaster caused by introducing European rabbits into Australia. By the turn of the 20th Century, the situation was so out of control that the creatures could not be killed fast enough to slow their spread.
Consensus and Profile
In “Counting Point Mutations”, we calculated the minimum number of symbol mismatches between two strings of equal length to model the problem of finding the minimum number of point mutations occurring on the evolutionary path between two homologous strands of DNA. If we instead have several homologous strands that we wish to analyze simultaneously, then the natural problem is to find an average-case strand to represent the most likely common ancestor of the given strands.
Finding a Motif in DNA
Finding the same interval of DNA in the genomes of two different organisms (often taken from different species) is highly suggestive that the interval has the same function in both organisms.
We define a motif as such a commonly shared interval of DNA. A common task in molecular biology is to search an organism’s genome for a known motif.
Cenk Celik 