How Python code is helping us to solve genetic codes
a talk by David Žihala

Genetic code is a set of rules which are telling us how the organisms translate information from mRNA into amino acids, the main parts of all proteins. Majority of organisms use so called standard genetic code.

However, a growing list of exceptions described from various organisms revealed an unexpected evolutionary flexibility of this fundamental molecular mechanism. Our lab has recently contributed to this field by discovering three novel genetic code variants.

The first part of the presentation will provide a brief introduction to the topic of genetic codes and the second part will be dedicated to our new findings in the filed of alternative genetic codes and how Python help us with some of them.

This talk is suitable for both beginner and advanced Pythonistas.

David Žihala

I am a PhD student from the University of Ostrava. I am mainly interested in alternative genetic codes, evolution, GTPases and molecular biology of unicellular eukaryotic organisms.

I started coding in Python approximately 2 years ago and I basically love it. I contributed to many scientific projects just because of Python. I consider Python so great and useful that I started to teach other people how to code.

Now, we have official Python course in our department, we organize Python workshop for biologists “OstraPy” and we also have weekly meetings with pizza, where we discuss many topics, including Python.