[Bioperl-l] New bioinformatics list

[Jon Orwant]

I've started up a public bioinformatics list.  I confess that don't
know if there's actually a need for one, or if the scope will need to
be narrowed to give the list focus.  Time will tell.

To give you a taste, here's a sample message I just sent.  You can
subscribe at http://labs.oreilly.com/mailman/listinfo/bioinformatics.

-Jon

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Subject: [Bioinformatics] NP-complete problems in bioinformatics
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Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 13:09:02 -0400

Nathan Torkington pointed me to
http://www.nature.com/nsu/010816/010816-9.html, which mentions
research turning sequence assembly from a Hamiltonian path problem to
an Eulerian path problem: still NP-complete, but faster.

This got me wondering about what the big NP-complete problems in
bioinformatics are.  I know about the toughness of sequence assembly,
similarity searches, the double digest problem, and protein folding.
Are there other common problems that provably require buckets of
computing horsepower?

In 1900, Hilbert outlined 23 major mathematical problems to be studied
in the coming century: http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/hilbert/problems.html.
Does it make sense to do the same for bioinformatics?

-- 
Jon Orwant, Ph.D.                     orwant @ oreilly.com
CTO, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.    http://www.oreilly.com
90 Sherman St, Cambridge MA 02140      (617) 354-5800 x599
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----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
Jon Orwant, Ph.D.                     orwant @ oreilly.com
CTO, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.    http://www.oreilly.com
90 Sherman St, Cambridge MA 02140      (617) 354-5800 x599