Between 12-13th October, 2022, the OLISSIPO team (the ESR José Basílio, the OLISSIPO project manager Sara Tanqueiro and the INESC-ID Pedro Ferreira) was present at the FICA Festival in Porto Salvo.

More than 100 students from basic schools participate in these sessions to hear taking about Computational Biology and participate in a hands-on session to build their own paper model of a DNA double helix.

Abstract: The acronym DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid. This long, hard-to-say word is the name of the double helix molecule that contains uniquely responsible information such as eye colour. There are four different bases in DNA: adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. These four chemicals are repeated over and over again in different orders on each strand of DNA. Human DNA contains about 3 billion pairs of these bases and the order in which the bases are arranged is very important and that is why there are different living things – like an animal, a plant or two different people. Come and discover what DNA is and how we can use computers and mathematics to understand these very different phenomena in Biology!

We would like to thank to FICA Festival and Instituto Superior Técnico and all the participants involved in this activity.