With the advent
of the new millenium, the scientific community marked a significant milestone
in the study of biology—the completion of the ‘‘working draft’’ of the human
genome. This work, which was chronicled in special editions of Nature and
Science in early 2001, signals a new beginning for modern biology, one
in which the majority of biological and biomedical research would be conducted
in a ‘‘sequence-based’’ fashion. This new approach, long-awaited and
much-debated, promises to quickly lead to advances not only in the
understanding of basic biological processes, but in the prevention, diagnosis,
and treatment of many genetic and genomic disorders. While the fruits of
sequencing the human genome may not be known or appreciated for another hundred
years or more, the implications to the basic way in which science and medicine
will be practiced in the future are staggering.
The availability
of this flood of raw information has had a significant effect on the field of
bioinformatics as well, with a significant amount of effort being spent on how
to effectively and efficiently warehouse and access these data, as well as on new
methods aimed at mining this warehoused data in order to make novel biological discoveries.
This new edition
of Bioinformatics attempts to keep up with the quick pace of change in
this field, reinforcing concepts that have stood the test of time while making
the reader aware of new approaches and algorithms that have emerged since the
publication of the first edition. Based on our experience both as scientists
and as teachers, we have tried to improve upon the first edition by introducing
a number of new features in the current version. Five chapters have been added
on topics that have emerged as being important enough in their own right to
warrant distinct and separate discussion: expressed sequence tags, sequence
assembly, comparative genomics, large-scale genome analysis, and BioPerl. We
have also included problem sets at the end of most of the chapters with the
hopes that the readers will work through these examples, thereby reinforcing
their command of the concepts presented therein. The solutions to these
problems are available through the book’s Web site, at www.wiley.com/bioinformatics.
We have been heartened by the large number of instructors who have adopted the
first edition as their book of choice, and hope that these new features will
continue to make the book useful both in the classroom and at the bench.
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