This book is the first of its kind to provide a large collection of bioinformatics problems with accompanying solutions. Notably, the problem set includes all of the problems offered in Biological Sequence Analysis, by Durbin et al. (Cambridge, 1998), widely adopted as a required text for bioinformatics courses at leading universities worldwide. Although many of the problems included in Biological Sequence Analysis as exercises for its readers have been repeatedly used for homework and tests, no detailed solutions for the problems were available. Bioinformatics instructors had therefore frequently expressed a need for fully worked solutions and a larger set of problems for use on courses. This book provides just that: following the same structure as Biological Sequence Analysis and significantly extending the set of workable problems, it will facilitate a better understanding of the contents of the chapters in BSA and will help its readers develop problem-solving skills that are vitally important for conducting successful research in the growing field of bioinformatics. All of the material has been class-tested by the authors at Georgia Tech, where the first ever MSc degree program in Bioinformatics was held.

Probabilistic models are becoming increasingly important in analysing the huge amount of data being produced by large-scale DNA-sequencing efforts such as the Human Genome Project. For example, hidden Markov models are used for analysing biological sequences, linguistic-grammar-based probabilistic models for identifying RNA secondary structure, and probabilistic evolutionary models for inferring phylogenies of sequences from different organisms. This book gives a unified, up-to-date and self-contained account, with a Bayesian slant, of such methods, and more generally to probabilistic methods of sequence analysis. Written by an interdisciplinary team of authors, it aims to be accessible to molecular biologists, computer scientists, and mathematicians with no formal knowledge of the other fields, and at the same time present the state-of-the-art in this new and highly important field.

Presents up-to-date computer methods for analysing DNA, RNA and protein sequences.

An edited volume describing the latest developments in approaching the problem of polymer sequence analysis, with special emphasis on the most relevant biopolymers (peptides and DNA) but not limited to them. The chapters will include peptide sequence analysis, DNA sequence analysis, analysis of biopolymers and nonpolymers, sequence alignment problems, and more.

Covers the fundamentals and techniques of multiple biological sequence alignment and analysis, and shows readers how to choose the appropriate sequence analysis tools for their tasks This book describes the traditional and modern approaches in biological sequence alignment and homology search. This book contains 11 chapters, with Chapter 1 providing basic information on biological sequences. Next, Chapter 2 contains fundamentals in pair-wise sequence alignment, while Chapters 3 and 4 examine popular existing quantitative models and practical clustering techniques that have been used in multiple sequence alignment. Chapter 5 describes, characterizes and relates many multiple sequence alignment models. Chapter 6 describes how traditionally phylogenetic trees have been constructed, and available sequence knowledge bases can be used to improve the accuracy of reconstructing phylogeny trees. Chapter 7 covers the latest methods developed to improve the run-time efficiency of multiple sequence alignment. Next, Chapter 8 covers several popular existing multiple sequence alignment server and services, and Chapter 9 examines several multiple sequence alignment techniques that have been developed to handle short sequences (reads) produced by the Next Generation Sequencing technique (NSG). Chapter 10 describes a Bioinformatics application using multiple sequence alignment of short reads or whole genomes as input. Lastly, Chapter 11 provides a review of RNA and protein secondary structure prediction using the evolution information inferred from multiple sequence alignments. • Covers the full spectrum of the field, from alignment algorithms to scoring methods, practical techniques, and alignment tools and their evaluations • Describes theories and developments of scoring functions and scoring matrices •Examines phylogeny estimation and large-scale homology search Multiple Biological Sequence Alignment: Scoring Functions, Algorithms and Applications is a reference for researchers, engineers, graduate and post-graduate students in bioinformatics, and system biology and molecular biologists. Ken Nguyen, PhD, is an associate professor at Clayton State University, GA, USA. He received his PhD, MSc and BSc degrees in computer science all from Georgia State University. His research interests are in databases, parallel and distribute computing and bioinformatics. He was a Molecular Basis of Disease fellow at Georgia State and is the recipient of the highest graduate honor at Georgia State, the William M. Suttles Graduate Fellowship. Xuan Guo, PhD, is a postdoctoral associate at Oak Ridge National Lab, USA. He received his PhD degree in computer science from Georgia State University in 2015. His research interests are in bioinformatics, machine leaning, and cloud computing. He is an editorial assistant of International Journal of Bioinformatics Research and Applications. Yi Pan, PhD, is a Regents' Professor of Computer Science and an Interim Associate Dean and Chair of Biology at Georgia State University. He received his BE and ME in computer engineering from Tsinghua University in China and his PhD in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Pan's research interests include parallel and distributed computing, optical networks, wireless networks and bioinformatics. He has published more than 180 journal papers with about 60 papers published in various IEEE/ACM journals. He is co-editor along with Albert Y. Zomaya of the Wiley Series in Bioinformatics.

Biology is in the midst of a era yielding many significant discoveries and promising many more. Unique to this era is the exponential growth in the size of information-packed databases. Inspired by a pressing need to analyze that data, Introduction to Computational Biology explores a new area of expertise that emerged from this fertile field- the combination of biological and information sciences. This introduction describes the mathematical structure of biological data, especially from sequences and chromosomes. After a brief survey of molecular biology, it studies restriction maps of DNA, rough landmark maps of the underlying sequences, and clones and clone maps. It examines problems associated with reading DNA sequences and comparing sequences to finding common patterns. The author then considers that statistics of pattern counts in sequences, RNA secondary structure, and the inference of evolutionary history of related sequences. Introduction to Computational Biology exposes the reader to the fascinating structure of biological data and explains how to treat related combinatorial and statistical problems. Written to describe mathematical formulation and development, this book helps set the stage for even more, truly interdisciplinary work in biology.