Forum:List of unresolved problems in Computational Biology / Bioinformatics?

Question

[Samuel Lampa]

I just saw about the "List of unresolved problems in Physics" on Hacker News, and thought to ask if anybody knows of a similar list in Computational Biology / Bioinformatics, or else maybe we could try to create one?

[Ben]

I guess we get the union of unsolved in biology and unsolved in CS for free

[pld]

Based on that union, the most pressing question is if Fairy circles are NP-complete or not.

That biology list is pretty terrible.

[sentausa]

Have you seen What Are The Big Questions That Bioinformatics And Computational Biology Will Be Answering In The Next Few Years??

[pld]

I'm never a fan of these things, they should be called "lists of well known unsolved problems in <field x>". Sometimes the problems aren't that important or are considered important because of who posed the original question. In some fields (e.g. physics) with incredibly large and well developed theoretical frameworks which allow 'easier' targeting of important problems.

I think this is an important part, we're still in the phase of basic astronomy, finding whats out there. It's hard to find any sort of theory that doesn't have at least one major biological case that ruins it.