Tandy Warnow - Böcker

A comprehensive account of both basic and advanced material in phylogeny estimation, focusing on computational and statistical issues. No background in biology or computer science is assumed, and there is minimal use of mathematical formulas, meaning that students from many disciplines, including biology, computer science, statistics, and applied mathematics, will find the text accessible. The mathematical and statistical foundations of phylogeny estimation are presented rigorously, following which more advanced material is covered. This includes substantial chapters on multi-locus phylogeny estimation, supertree methods, multiple sequence alignment techniques, and designing methods for large-scale phylogeny estimation. The author provides key analytical techniques to prove theoretical properties about methods, as well as addressing performance in practice for methods for estimating trees. Research problems requiring novel computational methods are also presented, so that graduate students and researchers from varying disciplines will be able to enter the broad and exciting field of computational phylogenetics.

This volume presents a compelling collection of state-of-the-art work in algorithmic computational biology, honoring the legacy of Professor Bernard M.E. Moret in this field. Reflecting the wide-ranging influences of Prof. Moret’s research, the coverage encompasses such areas as phylogenetic tree and network estimation, genome rearrangements, cancer phylogeny, species trees, divide-and-conquer strategies, and integer linear programming. Each self-contained chapter provides an introduction to a cutting-edge problem of particular computational and mathematical interest.Topics and features: addresses the challenges in developing accurate and efficient software for the NP-hard maximum likelihood phylogeny estimation problem; describes the inference of species trees, covering strategies to scale phylogeny estimation methods to large datasets, and the construction of taxonomic supertrees; discusses the inference of ultrametric distances from additive distance matrices, and the inference of ancestral genomes under genome rearrangement events; reviews different techniques for inferring evolutionary histories in cancer, from the use of chromosomal rearrangements to tumor phylogenetics approaches; examines problems in phylogenetic networks, including questions relating to discrete mathematics, and issues of statistical estimation; highlights how evolution can provide a framework within which to understand comparative and functional genomics; provides an introduction to Integer Linear Programming and its use in computational biology, including its use for solving the Traveling Salesman Problem.Offering an invaluable source of insights for computer scientists, applied mathematicians, and statisticians, this illuminating volume will also prove useful for graduate courses on computational biology and bioinformatics.

The refereed proceedings of the 9th Annual International Computing and Combinatorics Conference, COCOON 2003, held in Big Sky, MT, USA in July 2003. The 52 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 114 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on computational geometry, computational biology, computability and complexity theory, graph theory and graph algorithms, automata and Petri net theory, distributed computing, Web-based computing, scheduling, graph drawing, and fixed-parameter complexity theory.