During recent years, biological research has become increasingly based on large-scale experimentation such that data may be collected on an organismic scale. These data are voluminous, they are often very noisy, and their interpretation � and the configuration of the experiments involved � necessitates complex computer analysis. The respective computer methods are themselves an object of intensive research in a scientific discipline known as "computational biology" or "bioinformatics." Computational biology has a wide variety of facets that range from experiment configuration and low-level data analysis to computer-generated hypotheses