The decoding of the total genetic information of the human chromosome was finally completed in the year 2007 and it took more than two decades to finish. Thus one can imagine the magnanimity of the situation. There are millions of genes in a cells and it is near to impossible to decode all of them even if a computer is employed and operated manually. Thus the need for the bio-informatics arises. It deals with the ability of the student in understanding the different concepts of a genetic code and at the same time apply the computer’s help in tabulating the entire data which is humanly impossible.

Importance of the paper

The DOEACC B Level Course-Applied Bioinformatics Papers stresses a lot on the knowledge of the candidate about the genes and the genomes. It is also expected of the candidate to be familiar with the different processes that are employed in the isolation of the chromosomes from the cell. The paper has a lot of questions that deal with understanding of the candidate of the genetic structure and how the genes are made by specific amino acid sequences and are coded.

Format

This one is an offline exam where candidates write their answers on a plain paper given to write the answers.

Paper pattern

As this paper is also a part of DOEACC B-Level course, the paper pattern is same. There are 7 questions with the mandatory question being the first one. From the remaining 6 one need to answer 4 questions.

Markings

Question 1 has 4 marks questions which are 7 in number. All other questions carries 18 marks.

Some questions from the question paper

The questions that most frequently feature in the question paper are

Define the terms “Gene” and “Genome”.

Why is eukaryotic gene finding more difficult than prokaryotic gene finding?

Write at least four distinct substrings of “TTAG”.

Why is blastp preferred over blastn in homology searches?

For any probabilistic model of sequences we can write the probability of the sequence as

P(x) =P (xL xL-1 …, x1)

=P (xL|xL-1, …, x1) P (xL-1|xL-2, …, x1) P(x1)

Using the key property of markov chain, write down the expression of P(x).

Alignments are models that reflect different biological perspectives.  There are two approaches which consider similarity.  Name the algorithms and why do these exploit dynamic programming?

Define the term “overlap” with an example.

Time allotted

You need to finish this paper in 3 hours.

Recommended books

The subject is new but still the most popular books are “Artificial Intelligence and Molecular Biology by Lawrence Hunter (editor)” and “Bioinformatics: A Practical Guide to the Analysis of Genes and Proteins”.