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Summer Research Project
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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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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