Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing 7:112-114 (2002) GENOME-WIDE ANALYSIS AND COMPARATIVE GENOMICS INNA DUBCHAK Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, MS 84-171, Berkeley, CA 94720
[email protected] LIOR PACHTER Department of Mathematics UC Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720
[email protected] LIPING WEI Nexus Genomics, Inc. 390 O'Connor St. Menlo Park, CA 94025
[email protected] One of the key developments in biology during the past decade has been the completion of the sequencing of a number of key organisms, ranging from organisms with short genomes, such as various bacteria, to important model organisms such as Drosophila Melanogaster, and of course the human genome. As of February 2001, the complete genome sequences have been available for 4 eukaryotes, 9 archaea, 32 bacteria, over 600 viruses, and over 200 organelles (NCBI, 2001). The “draft” human sequence publicly available now spans over 90% of the genome, and finishing of the genome should be completed shortly. The large amount of available genomic sequence presents unprecedented opportunities for biological discovery and at the same time new challenges for the computational sciences. In particular, it has become apparent that comparative analyses of the genomes will play a central role in the development of computational methods for biological discovery. The principle of comparative analysis has long been a leitmotif in experimental biology, but the related computational challenge of large- scale comparative analysis leads to many interesting algorithmic challenges that remain at the forefront of computational biology research. The papers in this track represent a cross-section of the ongoing efforts to bridge the gap between comparative computational genomics and biology, and have been selected both for their algorithmic content, and the relevance of their application.