A comprehensive survey of a rapidly expanding field of combinatorial optimization, mathematically oriented but offering biological explanations when required. From one cell to another, from one individual to another, and from one species to another, the content of DNA molecules is often similar. The organization of these molecules, however, differs dramatically, and the mutations that affect this organization are known as genome rearrangements. Combinatorial methods are used to reconstruct putative rearrangement scenarios in order to explain the evolutionary history of a set of species, often formalizing the evolutionary events that can explain the multiple combinations of observed genomes as combinatorial optimization problems. This book offers the first comprehensive survey of this rapidly expanding application of combinatorial optimization. It can be used as a reference for experienced researchers or as an introductory text for a broader audience. Genome rearrangement problems have proved so interesting from a combinatorial point of view that the field now belongs as much to mathematics as to biology. This book takes a mathematically oriented approach, but provides biological background when necessary. It presents a series of models, beginning with the simplest (which is progressively extended by dropping restrictions), each constructing a genome rearrangement problem. The book also discusses an important generalization of the basic problem known as the median problem, surveys attempts to reconstruct the relationships between genomes with phylogenetic trees, and offers a collection of summaries and appendixes with useful additional information.

The papers in this volume were presented at the 9th Annual International C- puting and Combinatorics Conference (COCOON 2003), held July 25–28, 2003, in Big Sky, MT, USA. The topics cover most aspects of theoretical computer science and combinatorics related to computing. Submissionstotheconferencethisyearwereconductedelectronically.Atotal of 114 papers were submitted, of which 52 were accepted. The papers were evaluated by an international program committee consisting of Nina Amenta, Tetsuo Asano, Bernard Chazelle, Zhixiang Chen, Francis Chin, Kyung-Yong Chwa, Robert Cimikowski, Anne Condon, Michael Fellows, Anna Gal, Michael Hallett,DanielHuson,NaokiKatoh,D.T.Lee,BernardMoret,BrendanMumey, Gene Myers, Hung Quang Ngo, Takao Nishizeki, Cindy Phillips, David Sanko?, Denbigh Starkey, Jie Wang, Lusheng Wang, Tandy Warnow and Binhai Zhu. It is expected that most of the accepted papers will appear in a more complete form in scienti?c journals. The submitted papers were from Canada (6), China (7), Estonia (1), F- land (1), France (1), Germany (8), Israel (4), Italy (1), Japan (11), Korea (22), Kuwait (1), New Zealand (1), Singapore (2), Spain (1), Sweden (2), Switzerland (3), Taiwan (7), the UK (1) and the USA (34). Each paper was evaluated by at least three Program Committee members, assisted in some cases by subre- rees. In addition to selected papers, the conference also included three invited presentations by Jon Bentley, Dan Gus?eld and Joel Spencer.

The refereed proceedings of the 14th Annual International Computing and Combinatorics Conference, COCOON 2008, held in Dalian, China, in June 2008. The 66 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 172 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on algorithms and data structures, algorithmic game theory and online algorithms, automata, languages, logic, and computability, combinatorics related to algorithms and complexity, complexity theory, cryptography, reliability and security, and database theory, computational biology and bioinformatics, computational algebra, geometry, and number theory, graph drawing and information visualization, graph theory and algorithms, communication networks, and optimization, wireless network, network optimization, and scheduling problem.

The abstracts and papers in this volume were presented at the Fifth Annual International Computing and Combinatorics Conference (COCOON ’99), which was held in Tokyo, Japan from July 26 to 28, 1999. The topics cover most aspects of theoretical computer science and combinatorics pertaining to computing. In response to the call for papers, 88 high-quality extended abstracts were submitted internationally, of which 46 were selected for presentation by the p- gram committee. Every submitted paper was reviewed by at least three program committee members. Many of these papers represent reports on continuing - search, and it is expected that most of them will appear in a more polished and complete form in scienti c journals. In addition to the regular papers, this v- ume contains abstracts of two invited plenary talks by Prabhakar Raghavan and Seinosuke Toda. The conference also included a special talk by Kurt Mehlhorn on LEDA (Library of E cient Data types and Algorithms). The Hao Wang Award (inaugurated at COCOON ’97) is given to honor the paper judged by the program committee to have the greatest scienti c merit. The recipients of the Hao Wang Award 1999 were Hiroshi Nagamochi and Tos- hide Ibaraki for their paper \An Approximation for Finding a Smallest 2-Edge- Connected Subgraph Containing a Speci ed Spanning Tree".

Algebraic and Combinatorial Computational Biology introduces students and researchers to a panorama of powerful and current methods for mathematical problem-solving in modern computational biology. Presented in a modular format, each topic introduces the biological foundations of the field, covers specialized mathematical theory, and concludes by highlighting connections with ongoing research, particularly open questions. The work addresses problems from gene regulation, neuroscience, phylogenetics, molecular networks, assembly and folding of biomolecular structures, and the use of clustering methods in biology. A number of these chapters are surveys of new topics that have not been previously compiled into one unified source. These topics were selected because they highlight the use of technique from algebra and combinatorics that are becoming mainstream in the life sciences. - Integrates a comprehensive selection of tools from computational biology into educational or research programs - Emphasizes practical problem-solving through multiple exercises, projects and spinoff computational simulations - Contains scalable material for use in undergraduate and graduate-level classes and research projects - Introduces the reader to freely-available professional software - Supported by illustrative datasets and adaptable computer code

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 25th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, CPM 2014, held in Moscow, Russia, in June 2014. The 28 revised full papers presented together with 5 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 54 submissions. The papers address issues of searching and matching strings and more complicated patterns such as trees; regular expressions; graphs; point sets; and arrays. The goal is to derive combinatorial properties of such structures and to exploit these properties in order to achieve superior performance for the corresponding computational problems. The meeting also deals with problems in computational biology; data compression and data mining; coding; information retrieval; natural language processing; and pattern recognition.