Introduction to mathematical methods in bioinformatics. (Q1881358)

Bioinformetics can be defined as a collection of mathematical, statistical and computational methods for analyzing biological sequences. The book has two parts corresponding to two courses. The first part is ``Sequence Analysis'' and contains the following chapters: 1. Introduction; 2. Sequence Alignment; 3. Markov Chains and Hidden Markov Models; 4. Protein Folding; 5. Phylogenetic Reconstruction. The second part is ``Mathematical Background for Sequence Analysis'' with the chapters: 6. Elements of Probability Theory; 7. Significance of Sequence Allignment Scores; 8. Elements of Statistics; 9. Substitution Matrices. The chapters 6 and 8 contain very few proofs. Without reading Part II, one's understanding, of various procedures from Part I will be incomplete. But, the chapters 4 and 5 could each easily be expanded into a separate a book. The book concentrates on the mathematical basics of bioinformatics rather than on recent progress in the area. It is a comprehensive guide to bioinformatics, which takes into account that a bioinformatician should be able not only to use software packages, but also to know the mathematics behind these packages.