Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina, Columbia. Courses offered as part of the graduate and advanced undergraduate curriculum.
CSCE 769
This course is intended to familiarize investigators with theoretical concepts and algorithmic tools in the field of protein folding, including AlphaFold, ROSETTA, and I-TASSER. Widely-used software packages such as VMD and NAMD are also introduced. Upon completion, participants are expected to engage in competitive research in protein folding.
The course provides a brief introduction to main concepts of molecular biology, experimental methods of protein structure determination (principally NMR), and general classes of protein folding approaches (ab initio versus threading). Visualization, evaluation, and computation tools are introduced throughout.
CSCE 555
This course introduces the central concepts, algorithms, and tools that define bioinformatics, covering important problems including nucleotide and amino acid sequence alignment, DNA fragment assembly, phylogenetic reconstruction, and protein structure visualization and assessment.
The curriculum begins with a brief introduction to biological concepts and programming in Python, then delves into core bioinformatics algorithms and their biological applications.