Computation on molecular sequence data (strings) is at the heart of computational molecular biology. A DNA molecule can be thought of as a string over an alphabet of four characters {a,t,c,g} (nucleotides), while a protein can be thought of as a string over an alphabet of twenty characters (amino acids). A gene, which is physically embedded in a DNA molecule, typically encodes the amino acid sequence for a particular protein.

Existing and emerging algorithms for string computation provide a significant intersection between computer science and molecular biology.

The purpose of the proposed session is to bring together scientists from different fields of expertise in order to discuss biological problems and propose new ideas and techniques in today’s applications, based on technical ways that string algorithms employ in molecular biology.

“Discovering Regularities in BioSequences: Challenges and Applications”

Katerina Perdikuri*, Christos Makris and Athanasios Tsakalidis

“Distributed and Paged Suffix Trees and Their Application to Large-Scale Genomic Analysis”

Raphael Clifford and Marek Sergot*

“Implementing Approximate Regularities”

Manolis Christodoulakis, Costas Iliopoulos*, Kunsoo Park and Jeong Seop Sim

"Data Structuring Applications for String Problems in Bioinformatics”

Giannis Panagis* and Vangelis Theodoridis

“A linear algorithm for the detection of evolutive tandem repeats in biological sequences”

R. Groult, M. Lonard and Laurent Mouchard*