• HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
Wednesday, May 31, 2023
BIOENGINEER.ORG
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
No Result
View All Result
Bioengineer.org
No Result
View All Result
Home NEWS Science News Bioinformatics

DNA fix for school timetables

Bioengineer by Bioengineer
April 3, 2014
in Bioinformatics
Reading Time: 2 mins read
1
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedinShare on RedditShare on Telegram

Scientists in Russia plan to use DNA – our genetic material – to help them solve one of the perennial “back to school” problems faced by school administrators the world over: how to match up students, with classes and available teachers. Writing in the International Journal of Bioinformatics Research and Applications, the team explains how DNA’s ability to store information can be used to encode the timetabling problem and then a solution read out using enzymes.

DNA fix for school timetables

Igor Popov, Anastasiya Vorobyova and Irina Blinova of the St. Petersburg National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics, explain how timetabling is a so-called NP-complete problem. Such problems are complex and have many possible solutions, some of which are near-perfect others not so much. The classic school timetabling problem involves accommodating a number of students in a finite number of classrooms for appropriate lessons with a limited number of teachers offering their chosen subjects. In general, school administrators at large schools offering many diverse courses will expend a large amount of energy attempting to fit all students and teachers into appropriate timetable slots during the school week. Issues come to light when a given subject is oversubscribed or when a subject offered has very few takers.

The team explains that timetabling essentially consists of a set of resources (teachers and classrooms), a set of activities (lessons, study periods, physical education), and a set of dependencies between the activities (is the Latin teacher available on Monday mornings? Are students interested in studying Latin available or are they likely to be in their Greek lesson on Monday mornings?). Time is divided into slots of the same duration and these can be hard or soft: a hard constraint indicates that the slot is forbidden for an activity (absolutely no Latin lessons last thing on a Friday as the teacher has to catch an early train back to Rome), a soft constraint indicates that the slot is not preferred (the Latin teacher is always available on Monday mornings but can take classes on Tuesday if students cannot make Monday morning). Every activity and every resource may have assigned a set of time preferences, which indicate forbidden and not preferred time slots.

All possible timetables can be encoded in a large number of synthetic strands of DNA, the team then explains. They then apply the various resources and constraints to a second strand of DNA. When this is mixed with in the test-tube with the encoded DNA strands it will match up with its complementary strand, which can then be filtered from the brew. An enzymatic DNA reading system can then identify the solution plucked from the mixture and reveal the optimal timetable.

Finding a unique, fully working solution to the timetabling problem usually involves exponential growth as student numbers, courses offered and teaching resources increase. The application of a DNA algorithm to this problem, which could also be applied to other logistics and scheduling problems, reduces this exponential problem (due to massive parallelism) to a polynomial one. “At present, the result is purely theoretical,” says Popov. “Its implementation will be an interesting future problem.”

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Inderscience.

Share12Tweet8Share2ShareShareShare2

Related Posts

IMAGE

Ferrets, cats and civets most susceptible to coronavirus infection after humans

December 10, 2020
IMAGE

Artificial intelligence finds surprising patterns in Earth’s biological mass extinctions

December 10, 2020

Within a hair’s breadth–forensic identification of single dyed hair strand now possible

December 9, 2020

Deep Longevity publishes an epigenetic aging clock of unprecedented accuracy

December 8, 2020
Please login to join discussion

POPULAR NEWS

  • plants

    Plants remove cancer causing toxins from air

    39 shares
    Share 16 Tweet 10
  • Element creation in the lab deepens understanding of surface explosions on neutron stars

    36 shares
    Share 14 Tweet 9
  • Groundbreaking study uncovers first evidence of long-term directionality in the origination of human mutation, fundamentally challenging Neo-Darwinism

    115 shares
    Share 46 Tweet 29
  • How life and geology worked together to forge Earth’s nutrient rich crust

    35 shares
    Share 14 Tweet 9

About

We bring you the latest biotechnology news from best research centers and universities around the world. Check our website.

Follow us

Recent News

The clams that fell behind, and what they can tell us about evolution and extinction

Shedding light on the complex flow dynamics within the small intestine

Genetic change increased bird flu severity during U.S. spread

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 50 other subscribers
  • Contact Us

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.

No Result
View All Result
  • Homepages
    • Home Page 1
    • Home Page 2
  • News
  • National
  • Business
  • Health
  • Lifestyle
  • Science

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In