Bioinformatics and constraints
Summary
Bioinformatics is an exciting and rapidly developing field, and focuses
on solving problems arising from biology using methodology from computer
science. This tutorial introduces this topic for computer scientists, and
highlights those areas which we believe to be suitable for the application
of constraint solving techniques. The tutorial covers the following:
- Biological background: sequence, structure, function.
- Review of problem areas, including: genome and physical map & physical
map, transcription, expression, properties of DNA language, alignment
(sequence, structure), protein docking, ligand binding, metabolic
pathways, protein design, structure prediction, models of evolution.
- Computational techniques: representation & visualisation of biological
knowledge, database design for biological resources, data mining,
pattern searching & discovery, phylogenetic trees, clustering.