IA Mathematical Biology : Genetics teaching components
The following segment of the course is taught by a member of te Department of Genetics
Dr Aylwyn Scally : Probability, Genome Sequencing and Population Genetics
These lectures introduce fundamental concepts of probability and randomness, and how to build probabilistic models of biological systems. Such models are essential and widely used tools for understanding complex biological phenomena, and are particularly important in genetics and genome sequence analysis. The lectures also introduce basic population genetics and the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium as an important example of a probabilistic model.
1 Randomness, probability and counting :
Describing experiments: sample spaces and events ; Probability ; Conditional probability; Independence; Multiple events; Switching conditions; Conditional independence ; Counting
2 Bayes’ theorem
3 Solving problems in probability
4 Random variables and probability distributions :
Discrete probability distributions ; Cumulative distribution function ; Continuous distributions
5 Averages, variability and sampling :
Expected value ; Other measures of central tendency ; Variance ; Expectation and variance for special distributions ; Sampling
Joint distributions
Further information about the course
Course Organiser : Andrew Firth, aef24@cam.ac.uk
Course administrator : Pathology Teaching Office, teach@path.cam.ac.uk
Contributing Depts : Zoology, Plant Sciences, Genetics
Page updated 31/07/2025