Bioinformatics is a challenging and fast growing area of
research, which is of utmost importance for our understanding of life. Major contributions to this discipline can have thousands of positive effects in medicine, agriculture, or industry. To pick out only a few examples, Bioinformatics tackles problems related to:
* Recognition, analysis, and organization of DNA sequences
* Biological systems simulations (for metabolic or regulatory
networks)
* Prediction of the spatial conformation of a biological poly-
mer, given its sequence of monomers (in particular for
proteins and RNA)
All these problems can be naturally formalized using constraints over finite domains or intervals of reals. Biology is a source of extremely interesting and challenging problems that can be encoded exploiting the application of recent and more general
techniques of constraint programming. In this framework, some
problems that have been successfully tackled are:
* The fundamental bioinformatics problem of sequence alignment
can be solved by recent inference based constraint methods
* Biological systems simulations can be easily designed using
concurrent constraint programming, and
* The constrained-based prediction of protein conformations
promoted the development of new search strategies, new
constraint solvers, and general symmetry breaking.
The main aim of this workshop is twofold. On the one hand, to share recent results in this area (new constraint solvers, new
prediction and simulation programs). On the other hand, to
present new challenging problems formalized and/or solved with constraint based methods.