For the biologist, I hope this will provide direction as to how to approach this difficult subject. For computer scientists interested in application of their discipline to problems of biological sequence analysis, I hope that this chapter will help you see what and where the important problems are. Identification of Protein Primary Sequence from DNA Sequence. Searching of databases for sequences similar to a new sequence. Calculation of sequence alignments for evolutionary inferences and to aid in structural and functional analysis.
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The fundamental building blocks of life are proteins. Enzymes, which are the molecular machines responsible for virtually all of the chemical transformations that cells are capable of, are proteins. In addition, much of the structure of a cell is made up of proteins. That part of the structure which is not made up of proteins is produced by enzymes which are proteins. A human contains on the order of 100,000 different proteins.