Strings 2008

Strings and Searching

Why are we covering this material

• Strings are the most basic data structure to store information

• Strings are commonly encountered in all fields of daily life
  • text strings (arts)
  • bit or data strings (computer science, physics, astronomy, ...)
  • biological sequences (biology)

• To retrieve information we need to search strings (quickly!)
  • google text search
  • search for extraterrestrial life
  • searching genomic sequences

Topics in this section

• Background: Biological sequences
  • What is DNA, RNA, protein
  • The central dogma of biology
  • Evolution (tree of life)

• Comparing sequences
  • exact matches
  • similar matches

• Searching pattern in sequences
  • exact matches
  • similar matches

goto Background

--ThomasHuber 10:48, 10 January 2008 (EST)