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Summer Research Project

My Mentor

Dr. Condon is a professor at University of British Columbia (yep, all the way in canada, in case you haven't figured out where I am yet). She's with the computer science department here. Her research is concentrated on complexity theory and biomolecular theory.

I could try and tell ya a bit more about her, but for now, you can visit her website if you want to know more...
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Research Subject

This summer I am doing research in RNA secondary structures. The research is pretty varied, but first some background information.

Genetic information is stored in the form of strands of DNA formed from four nucleotides: A,T,C,G. The DNA bonds to form a double helix such that As are bonded with Ts and Cs are bonded with Gs. RNA is created by replacing all the Ts with Us. It is found in a single strand that is used to code for specific proteins required by the cell.

Because DNA and RNA tend toward bonding, a single strand of DNA or RNA may sometimes fold over and bond with itself. When creating DNA ``words'' scientists want to know what secondary structures they may form. There does exist a dynamic programming algorithm that will determine what secondary structures a word will likely fold into, but what happens if instead of a single strand, one has several words they would like to concatenate, such that any of several words can be in a given location? This gives a total of nm different strands to test for folding, where n is the number of words that can go in any space and m is the number of words concatenated together. Danielle and I are studying problems related to this.
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