In an organism, DNA carries the genetic information, which is called the genome. It is represented as four-letter sequences using the letters A, C, G and T; based on these sequences, computer methods described in this book can answer fundamental questions in bioinformatics.
This book explores how to quickly find sequences of a few hundred nucleotides within a genome that may be made up of several billion, how to compare those sequences and how to reconstruct the complete sequence of a genome. It also discusses the problems of identifying bacteria in a given environment and predicting the structure of RNA based on its sequence.