The course provides an introduction to molecular biology and to quantitative methods that can be used to extract information from complex biological systems, including the analysis of DNA, RNA and protein sequences, the reconstruction of phylogenetic trees, and the use of machine-learning techniques to analyze the structure of gene and protein networks.

• understanding basics notions of molecular biology; • understanding basic approaches to sequence alignment; • being familiar with structural inference and maximum entropy techniques; • being able to code simple sequence-alignment algorithms; • being able to apply basic machine-learning methods to given genetic and biological problems.

Basics of probability theory, principles of statistical physics, basic programming skills (any language).

• Introduction to Molecular Biology: central dogma, DNA, RNA, proteins; gene regulation; metabolism; (20 h, C. Bosia) • Hidden Markov models: from pairwise to multiple sequence alignments; inference in protein families; phylogeny reconstruction; RNA folding; (20 h, A. Gamba) • Machine learning techniques: introduction to widely used methodologies (e.g. neural networks, random forests, convolution neural networks, Bayesian neural networks, recurrent neural networks, LSTM); application to genetic and biological studies; (20 h, E. Ficarra).

The course alternates lectures on theoretical topics (approximately 45 hours) and hands-on computer lab (approximately 15 hours), where the students will be asked to apply theoretical ideas and algorithms to selected problems.

• Course handouts • B. Alberts et al., Molecular Biology of the Cell, Garland Science, 2015 • R. Durbin et al., Biological Sequence Analysis: Probabilistic Models of Proteins and Nucleic Acids, Cambridge Un. Press, 2002 • H.C. Nguyen, R. Zecchina and J. Berg, Inverse statistical problems: from the inverse Ising problem to data science, Adv. Phys., 66 (2017) 197-261. • S. Cocco et al., Inverse statistical physics of protein sequences: a key issues review, Rep. Progr. Phys. 81 (2018) 032601. • J. Felsenstein, Inferring phylogenies, Sinauer Associates, 2004 • C.M. Bishop, Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, Springer, 2011 • Suggested scientific publications

Modalità di esame: Prova orale obbligatoria; Progetto individuale;

Exam: Compulsory oral exam; Individual project;

... The oral test will consist of 2-3 broad questions on the main topics of the lectures. The individual project will consist of the application of computational and machine-learning techniques to a given biological problem, and will be presented as ppt slides in an oral discussion. The grading of the project will contribute to 1/3 of the overall assessment.

Gli studenti e le studentesse con disabilità o con Disturbi Specifici di Apprendimento (DSA), oltre alla segnalazione tramite procedura informatizzata, sono invitati a comunicare anche direttamente al/la docente titolare dell'insegnamento, con un preavviso non inferiore ad una settimana dall'avvio della sessione d'esame, gli strumenti compensativi concordati con l'Unità Special Needs, al fine di permettere al/la docente la declinazione più idonea in riferimento alla specifica tipologia di esame.