Research Plan Sagi Snir 1 Analytical Approaches in Comparative Genomics

Traditional biology has changed dramatically in the past two decades to the degree that advancements in the 21st century will be dominated by research at the convergence of biologi-cal, physical, and information sciences. Driven by large scientific endeavors such as the human genome project, it has become very much an information science, closely tied to tools and meth-ods of the mathematical sciences (e.g. modeling, algorithms, etc.). In parallel, high-throughput sequencing, expression profiling and proteomics technologies are generating exponentially grow-ing amounts of data. This interplay between the mathematical and biological sciences, and the necessity to process and annotate this new data gave rise to a new, interdisciplinary field, called bioinformatics. My Ph.D. was focused on mathematical and algorithmic solutions to problems in bioin-formatics, in particular in the field of evolutionary tree reconstruction (phylogenetics). The problems I have investigated are characterized by a scarcity of accurate, fast methods. This is partly due to the following reasons: • Lack of understanding of the biological factors influencing the evolutionary process. • Almost all problems arise in this field are computationally hard