Biological sequence analysis

This talk will review a little over a decade’s research on applying certain stochastic models to biological sequence analysis. The models themselves have a longer history, going back over 30 years, although many novel variants have arisen since that time. The function of the models in biological sequence analysis is to summarize the information concerning what is known as a motif or a domain in bioinformatics, and to provide a tool for discovering instances of that motif or domain in a separate sequence segment. We will introduce the motif models in stages, beginning from very simple, non-stochastic versions, progressively becoming more complex, until we reach modern profile HMMs for motifs. A second example will come from gene finding using sequence data from one or two species, where generalized HMMs or generalized pair HMMs have proved to be very effective. 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: 60J20, 92C40.