 About the 2005 Topic
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Program Details
Application for a Pair of Math and Biology Teachers from Same School
Application for a Pair of Math and Biology Teachers from Different Schools
Application for Individual Teachers
BMCI Staff
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Potential projects for student research
Possible Topics (list provided by Steve Billups) - this list will be added to as suggestions come in:
DNA Computing. The field of DNA computing started in 1994 with a breakthrough paper by Adleman [L. M. Adleman, Molecular computation of solutions to combinatorial problems, Science, 266:1021-1024, 1994.] The basic idea is to use DNA molecules in the laboratory to solve difficult combinatorial problems. Adleman showed how this could be done to solve the Hamiltonian path problem. Since then, the technology has been extended to solve many other combinatorial problems. The idea behind this project is to seek out new applications of DNA computing, and determine how these problems can be solved in a laboratory.
Heuristics for Screening Chimeric Clones. Shotgun sequencing of a genome involves making many copies of the DNA of the organism, breaking the DNA into fragments (of up to 1000 base pairs long), and then piecing together overlapping fragments to reconstruct the entire genome. Many sophisticated techniques have been developed to reconstruct the genome from these overlapping fragments.
One difficulty that must be dealt with is the creation of chimeric fragments or chimeras. A chimera arises when two regular fragments from distinct parts of the target sequence join end-to-end to form a longer fragment that is not a continuous part of the original target sequence.
Knots. When DNA is.
Links for other possible topics:
Documents Produced page for the BMCI 2004 Program (password protected)
Documents Produced page for the BMCI 2005 Program (password protected)
Link to previous Student Research Projects
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