… something about the introduction, cells as computers in soup

the first major concept is sequence alignment.

  • some amount of setup, but basic concept is that you work a lot with really long, non-delineated strings in biology (DNA!)
  • as an example, we can often use our understanding of existing genes and proteins to understand the function of new genes that look similar — but for this we need some way to define “similar”
  • this is sequence alignment

move from bio cs…

  • machinery here is variations on the theme of longest common subsequence

longest common subsequence