Algorithms Foundations

Biology offers a huge amount and variety of data to be processed. Such data has to be stored, analysed, compared, searched, classified, etcetera, feeding with new challenges many fields of computer science. Among them, algorithmics plays a special role in the analysis of biological sequences, structures, and networks. Indeed, especially due to the flood of data coming from sequencing projects as well as from its down-stream analysis, the size of digital biological data to be studied requires the design of very efficient algorithms. Moreover, biology has become, probably more than any other fundamental science, a great source of new algorithmic problems asking for accurate solutions. Nowadays, biologists more and more need to work with in silico data, and therefore it is important for them to understand why and how an algorithm works, in order to be confident in its results. The goal of this chapter is to give an overview of fundamentals of algorithms design and evaluation to a non computer scientist.