Researchers from all disciplines, including Policy Management and Environment and Information Studies, will apply sequence analysis methods to tackle problems in their fields (biology, language, manuscript, music, etc.).
Sequence analysis is a broad field, covering any kinds of analyses of textual sequences; e.g. those representing genomes (DNA) and proteins (amino acids). The biological sequence analyses include predicting gene function, inferring phylogenetic relationships, and ancestral reconstruction (Coghlan, 2017; Hall, 2017). For instance, phylogenetic trees inferred from viral sequence data can be used to estimate viral emergence, characterize the geographic spread of the virus, and identify instances of adaptive mutations (Martin et al., 2021). The sequence analysis methods have been used not only in the field of biology, but also in genealogy of manuscripts (Barbrook et al., 1998) and quantitative evaluation of melodic similarity (Savage et al., 2018). Thus, text-processing skills necessary to analyze sequence data can be applied to the analysis of data in other fields.
This course will provide the introduction to the main tools and databases used in the analysis of sequence data and explains how these can be used together to answer biological questions.