Manifestation and exploitation of invariants in bioinformatics

Abstract

Whenever a programmer writes a loop, or a mathematician does a proof by induction, an invariant is involved. The discovery and understanding of invariants often underlies problem solving in many domains. I discuss in this tutorial powerful invariants in some problems relevant to biology and medicine. In the process, we learn several major paradigms (invariants, emerging patterns, guilt by association), some important applications (active sites, key mutations, origin of species, protein functions, disease diagnosis), some interesting technologies (sequence comparison, multiple alignment, machine learning, signal processing, microarrays), and the economics of bioinformatics. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.