Bioinformatics Algorithms

Bioinformatics Algorithms is really a string-algorithms course dressed in biology: the central question is how you find structure, similarity, and assembly signal in DNA sequences that are too long and too noisy for naive methods to handle. You'll work through dynamic programming alignment (Needleman-Wunsch, Smith-Waterman), heuristic search like BLAST, k-mer indexing with hash tables and Bloom filters, and graph-based assembly, applying them on five homework sets plus a midterm and final that lean on tracing and adapting algorithms. It assumes you're comfortable with algorithm design and complexity from CS 473, and it's the natural bridge into genomics research, computational biology labs, and any work touching modern sequencing pipelines.