Biomat 2008 International Symposium on Mathematical and Computational Biology, Campos Do Jordão, Brazil, 22-27 November 2008

The present volume contains selected contributed papers from the BIOMAT 2008 Symposium and lectures delivered by keynote speakers during the plenary sessions. All chapters are centered on fundamental interdisciplinary areas of mathematical modeling of biosystems, like mathematical biology, biological physics, evolution biology and bioinformatics. It contains new results on the mathematical analysis of reaction-diffusion equations, demographic Allee effects and the dynamics of infection. Recent approaches to the modeling of biosystem structure, comprehensive reviews on icosahedral viral capsids and the classification of biological data via neural networks with prior knowledge, and a new perspective on a theoretical basis for bioinformatics are also discussed. This book contains original results on reaction-diffusion waves: the population dynamics of fishing resources and the effectiveness of marine protected areas; an approach to language evolution within a population dynamics framework; the analysis of bacterial genome evolution with Markov chains; the usefulness of Steiner trees on the modeling of amide planes in proteins; and the choice of defense strategies and the study of the arms-race phenomenon in a host-parasite system.