for this speciality and effectively distinguishing this area of science from the more general fields of Genomics or Computational Biology. The first use of this term in scientific literature, according to MEDLINE abstracts, was just one year earlier in Nucleic Acids Research. The final Computational Genomics conference was held in 2006, featuring a keynote talk by Nobel Laureate Barry Marshall, co-discoverer of the link between Helicobacter pylori and stomach ulcers. As of 2014, the leading conferences in the field include Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) and Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB). The development of computer-assisted mathematics (using products such as Mathematica or Matlab) has helped engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists to start operating in this domain, and a public collection of case studies and demonstrations is growing, ranging from whole genome comparisons to gene expression analysis. This has increased the introduction of different ideas, including concepts from systems and control, information theory, strings analysis and data mining. It is anticipated that computational approaches will become and remain a standard topic for research and teaching, while students fluent in both topics start being formed in the multiple courses created in the past few years. Contributions of computational genomics research to biology Contributions of computational genomics research to biology include: proposing cellular signalling networks proposing mechanisms of genome evolution predict precise locations of all human genes using comparative genomics techniques with several mammalian and vertebrate species predict conserved genomic regions that are related to early embryonic development discover potential links between repeated sequence motifs and tissue-specific gene expression measure regions of genomes that have undergone unusually rapid evolution Genome comparison Computational tools have been developed to assess the similarity of genomic sequences. Some of them are alignment-based distances such as Average Nucleotide Identity. These methods are highly specific, while being computationally slow. Other, alignment-free methods, include statistical and probabilistic approaches. One example is Mash, a probabilistic approach using minhash. In this method, given a number k, a genomic sequence is transformed into a shorter sketch through a random hash function on the possible k-mers. For example, if , sketches of size 4 are being constructed and given the following hash function the sketch of the sequence is {0,1,1,2} which are the smallest hash values of its k-mers of size 2. These sketches are then compared to estimate the fraction of shared k-mers (Jaccard index) of the corresponding sequences. It is