Computational Challenges in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology

Bioinformatics has emerged as a crucial component in modern research in biotechnology and medicine, due to the high-throughput measument technologies and the shift of focus from the study of individual genes and proteins to systems behaviour of cells and organisms - systems biology. For computer science, this new biology presents many challenges to be solved. I will chart some of the challenges faced in general and then concetrate on a particular problem area: reconstructing the metabolic networks and estimating the activity of metabolic pathways.