The refereed proceedings from the 7th International Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics are provided in this volume. Papers address current issues in algorithms in bioinformatics, ranging from mathematical tools to experimental studies of approximation algorithms to significant computational analyses. Biological problems examined include genetic mapping, sequence alignment and analysis, phylogeny, comparative genomics, and protein structure.

The papers contained in this volumewere presented at the 11thAnnual Sym- sium on CombinatorialPattern Matching, held June 21-23, 2000 at the Univ- sit edeMontr eal. They were selected from 44 abstracts submitted in response to the call for papers. In addition, there were invited lectures by Andrei Broder (AltaVista), Fernando Pereira (AT&T Research Labs), and Ian H. Witten (U- versity of Waikato). The symposium was preceded by a two-day summer school set up to - tract and train young researchers. The lecturers at the school were Greg Butler, ClementLam, andGusGrahne: BLAST Howdoyousearchsequencedatabases?, DavidBryant: Phylogeny, Ra aeleGiancarlo: Algorithmicaspectsof speech rec- nition, Nadia El-Mabrouk: Genome rearrangement, LaxmiParida: Flexib- pattern discovery, and Ian H. Witten: Adaptive text mining: inferring structure from sequences. Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM) addresses issues of searching and matching strings and more complicated patterns such as trees, regular expr- sions graphs, point sets, and arrays. The goal is to derive non-trivial combi- torial properties of such structures and to exploit these properties in order to achieve superior performance for the corresponding computational problems. Over recent years a steady ?ow of high-quality research on this subject has changed a sparse set of isolated results into a fully-?edged area of algorithmics