JOĆO CARLOS SETUBAL



Joćo Carlos Setubal is associate professor of Computer Science at the Institute of Computing of the University of Campinas, Brazil. He heads the Institute's Bioinformatics Laboratory, which provides bioinformatics support for several genome projects.


Short CV

 

Abstract of the invited talk  

The maximum subsequence algorithm and genomic islands in Xanthomonas

The problem of finding a consecutive subsequence of numbers of maximum sum can be solved by a simple, elegant, and fast algorithm. This algorithm has a remarkable number of applications in computational biology. I will describe the algorithm and some of its uses. In the second half of the talk I will switch to the problem of finding genomic islands in bacterial sequences. Genomic islands are important regions of genomes, especially in the case of pathogenic bacteria. The characterization of such islands require the application of several criteria, and is not straightforward. I will show how comparative genomics data provide powerful additional evidence to help locate genomic islands. This turns out to be yet another application of the maximum subsequence algorithm. I will illustrate this technique using data from the Xanthomonas genome project.