WCB 2012 - Workshop on Constraint Based Methods for Bioinformatics

Topics. 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 polymer, 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.