  In the past decade computational biology has grown from a cottage industry
with a handful of researchers to an attractive interdisciplinary field,
catching the attention and imagination of many quantitatively-minded
scientists. Of interest to us is the key role played by the EM algorithm during
this transformation. We survey the use of the EM algorithm in a few important
computational biology problems surrounding the "central dogma"; of molecular
biology: from DNA to RNA and then to proteins. Topics of this article include
sequence motif discovery, protein sequence alignment, population genetics,
evolutionary models and mRNA expression microarray data analysis.
