Bioinformatics: A Challenge to Constraint Programming

Bioinformatics is a rapidly growing field at the intersection of biology and computer science. As such, it poses a wealth of problems, opportunities, and challenges for both areas. This paper overviews some of these issues, with an emphasis on those that seem most amenable to constraint programming (CP) approaches and where CP has made some progress. Since bioinformatics is tightly focused on real-life applications, this paper does not expand on theoretical principles but, rather, tries to give an idea of the practical issues. At this light, the paper briefly presents the selected problems together with the solutions found so far, that illustrate the versatility of CP techniques that have been used in this area and the need to integrate them with other complementary techniques to handle realistic applications.