By means of a series of examples, from classic contributions to probability theory as well as the author's own, an attempt is made to convince the reader that "problem solving is often a matter of cooking up an appropriate Markov chain". Topics touched upon along the way include coupling,...

This document presents a survey of the statistical and combinatorial aspects of four areas of comparative genomics: gene order based measures of evolutionary distances between species, construction of phylogenetic trees, detection of horizontal transfer of genes, and detection of ancient whole...