Chapter 18 - Computational Biology

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter gives a general introduction to biological pathway and multiple sequence alignment problems. For the latter, a sparse-memory search approach is presented. Computational biology or bioinformatics is a large research field of its own. It is dedicated to the discovery and implementation of algorithms that facilitate the understanding of biological processes. The field encompasses different areas, such as building evolutionary trees and operating on molecular sequence data. Many approaches in computational biology refer to statistical and machine-learning techniques. This chapter concentrates on aspects for which the paradigm of state space search applies. A tight analogy between biological and computational processes is observed. For example, generating test sequences for a computational system relates to generating experiments for a biological system. On the other hand, many biochemical phenomena reduce to the interaction between defined sequences. Two problems were selected as representatives for the field and in which heuristics have been applied for increasing the efficiency of the exploration. The core of this chapter aims at providing a coherent perspective and points out recent trends in research of this ubiquitous problem in computational biology.