About Me
Welcome to my web-site. I am Dr O. Krishnadev, a computational biologist. You can view a very brief CV using one of the links given above. My interest in computational biology started around the time I joined IISc. My interest in computers began much earlier. What I like about computers is the input and output is very precise, and exact. I had difficulties with inter-personal relationships since my childhood. I believe it was mostly because I failed to understand the why and how of human behavior that i became interested in computers which behave in a precise and predictable manner.
Anyway, when I was in college, I realized that most of what I wanted to do in my life (energy metabolism, development, neurochemistry to name a few), had already been worked out in great detail. Of course I now realize that even the great body of knowledge in these areas is not sufficient, but back then it seemed that there is no fundamental principle left for me to discover. Those were the dark days of my life when I almost thought of leaving science and taking up computer science. But, a few discussions with my elder sister, who was doing PhD in CCMB, Hyderabad, revealed to me that there are fundamental processes which we still do not understand at all. Foremost among them, she said is the protein folding problem.
That was the spark that I desperately needed. I decided then and there that I have to work on the protein folding problem, and be known as the "father of protein folding". A Nobel or two along the way would'nt hurt either. Suffice to say that I read a lot on protein folding, and thought even more on the problem, and I came to the conclusion that it cannot be studied experimentally. Thus, when it was time to choose a project during MS at IISc, I chose to work in computational labs. The journey is not yet completed. Actually, it hasn't started in earnest, but I am a much better computational biologist today than I was six years ago, when I decided to jump into it. Along the way, I have written numerous programs, and a few papers (given in the publications tab). This site is a compilation of all my programs.
About the site
In my mind, all my programs are bits and pieces of a very big program I am in the process of writing for solving the protein folding problem. So, in my head all these small programs sound quite grand to me. I though by putting them on the web, I will know better if any of these are really useful or not. Moreover, I am quite lousy in documentation and cleaning up my programs. You will see a lot of loose ends in my programs. So, in my grand scheme of things, I expect to get hundreds of emails regarding the lousiness of my programs, which will goad me to write better programs. So, please download as many programs as you can. All programs are written by me (which use external libraries), so hopefully I can give away all of them free. Please drop in a mail (10 sentences at least) if you find them useful, or drop in a line in case you find then complicated and frustrating.
The programs are given with short descriptions in the Projects page which also lists some of the grander projects which I would like to work on (or I am working on currently).