# Introduction This book will contain a collection of lecture notes largely based on undergraduate and graduate classes taught by [Mihai Pop](https://pop-lab.org) at the University of Maryland. The goal is to eventually also include a collection of exercises/problem sets that can be used for formative or summative assessments. ## Acknowledgements A large part of the undergraduate curriculum described in the lecture notes was inspired by [Pavel Pevzner](https://bioalgorithms.ucsd.edu/) and [Philip Compeau](https://compeau.cbd.cmu.edu/)'s [Bioinformatics Algorithms](https://www.bioinformaticsalgorithms.org/) book. Several lecture notes (particularly related to sequence alignment statistics and motif finding) are based on presentations by [Stephen Altschul](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Altschul). Additional major contributions were made by Jacquelyn Michaelis while co-teaching an undergraduate bioinformatics class. The initial version of the lecture notes was created with the help of students taking a graduate-level bioinformatics class: Noam Auslander\ Joshua Brulé\ Hyongtae Cho \ Mark Daly\ Wikum Dinalankara \ Geet Duggal\ Ted Gibbons\ Jonathan Gluck\ Raul Guerra \ Chris M. Hill\ Sam Huang \ Assaf Magen\ Jesse Moll \ Koyel Mukherjee \ Emre Sefer\ Ferhan Ture \ Xiao Wang \ Derrick Wood --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://mpop.gitbook.io/bioinformatics-lecture-notes/readme.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.