Algorithms on Stings, Trees, and Sequences: Computer Science and Computational Biology D a n Gusfield University of Cali¢ornia, Davis Cambridge University Press, 1998 ISBN: 0-521-58519-8 Preface (Abridged) The history and motivation Although I d i d n ' t know it at the time, I began writing this book in the s u m m e r of 1988 when I was part of a computer science research group at the H u m a n Genome Center of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Our group followed the standard assumption t h a t biologically meaningful results could come from considering DNA as a one-dimensional character string, abstracting away th e reality of DNA as a flexible three-dimensional molecule, interacting in a dynamic environment with protein and RNA, and repeating a life-cycle in which even the classic linear chromosome exists for only a fraction of the time. A similar, but stronger, assumption existed for protein, holding for example t h a t all the information needed for correct three-dimensional folding is contained in the protein sequence itself, essentiaUy independent of the biological environment the protein lives in. This assumption has recently been modified, but remains largely intact. For non-biologlsts, these
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