This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Eighth Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, CPM 97, held in Aarhus, Denmark, in June/July 1997.
The volume presents 20 revised full papers carefully selected from 32 submissions received; also included are abstracts of two invited contributions. The volume is devoted to the issue of searching and matching strings and more complicated patterns, such as trees, regular expressions, graphs, point sets and arrays. The results presented are particularly relevant to molecular biology, but also to information retrieval, pattern recognition, compiling, data compression and program analysis.

Coalescent theory tells us what gene genealogies are expected to look like if populations have different demographic histories - i.e, population size, structure, etc. The aim of this book is to provide an accessible introduction to Coalescent Theory with a view towards data analysis. Coalescent Theory has in the last two decades moved from being an obscure technique that appealed to mathematical population geneticists to a central tool in data analysis of DNA sequences. The completion of the sequencing of the human genome and accompanying determination of SNPs and haplotypes will increase its importance even further. This textbook, rich in examples and illustrations, is suitable for a graduate course in statistics, population-, molecular-, and medical genetics.