Summary
Bioinformatics holds great promise for the advancement of agriculture, public health, drug design, and the understanding of complex medical and biological systems. For this promise to come to fruition, new query algorithms, data models, and data management techniques need to be developed that can provide access to the varied kinds and large amounts of biological data. This chapter presents scalable index structures for DNA/protein sequences, protein structures, and pathways. After a brief discussion of sequences and structures, the focus shifts to pathways. Modeling of pathways along with their qualitative and quantitative characteristics is considered. Techniques that allow comparison and querying of static and dynamic aspects of pathways are presented.