The 5th International Conference on Bio-Inspired Models of Network, Information and Computing Systems (Bionetics 2010) Special Track on Bioinformatics

Abstract

The special track on bioinformatics was held in Boston, December 1-3 2010, as part of the 5th international ICST Conference on Bio-Inspired Models of Network, Information, and Computing Systems (BIONETICS 2010). The aim of the bioinformatics special track is to form a closer relationship between researchers using biology as inspiration for computation and those using computation to study biology. In some cases, these methods have come full circle, as when biologically inspired computational intelligence methods are in turn used to analyze biological data. The bioinformatics track aims to attract high-quality research contributions in all areas of computational molecular biology.The paper by Aleksandar Poleksic, "Optimal pairwise alignment of fixed protein structures in subquadratic time", 1 presents an algorithm capable of finding an alignment between a pair of fixed protein structures that optimizes a commonly used measure of protein structure similarity. With its subquadratic running time in the length of protein structure, the algorithm by Poleksic compares favorably to the standard dynamic programming algorithm for the same problem. The described method can be used to increase the efficiency of some popular distance-based methods for protein structure comparison.