Preface

Some of the aspects related to the use of combinatorial and algorithmic techniques in computational molecular biology are discussed in the fifth installment of the Discrete Applied Mathematics series on computational molecular biology. The series has published some of the significant research results on the mathematical and algorithmic foundations on the discrete aspects of computational molecular biology. The latest issue contains 15 papers covering a wide range of computational problems that are influenced by molecular biology. The application areas within biology that create the problems and studied in these papers include genome rearrangements, protein and RNA folding, sequence analysis and motif finding, phylogeny, DNA chips, and haplotype analysis. The mathematical techniques that are used to solve these problems include algorithmics, statistics, combinatorics, optimization, probability, graph theory, complexity, and mathematics.