As the
sequencing phase of the human and other genome projects nears completion, we
are faced with the task of understanding how the vast strings of Cs, As, Ts, and
Gs encode a being. With the recent advent of microarrays and other high throughput
biologic technologies, we have moved from trying to understand single molecules
and pathways to that of integrative systems. We are only beginning to grasp the
questions we can ask as we are now challenged to understand these large in silico,
in vitro, and in vivo data sets. The new field of Bioinformatics was born of a series
of meetings among “wet-bench” scientists, in the early 1980s, to meet this challenge.
With the recruitment of mathematicians, computer scientists, statisticians, and
astrophysicists to this field, we have now begun to design and implement some of
the basic tools that will enable data integration and multidimensional analyses
of these varied but unified data sets. For those new to Bioinformatics, this
cross pollenization of the Life, Physical, and Theoretical sciences wants for a
common language. With this in mind, Introduction to Bioinformatics: A
Theoretical and Practical Approach was written as an introductory
text for the undergraduate, graduate, or professional.
At once, this
text provides the physical scientist, whether mathematician, computer scientist,
statistician or astrophysicist, with a biological framework to understand the questions
a life scientist would pose in the context of the computational issues and currently
available tools. At the same time, it provides the life scientist with a source
for the various computational tools now available, along with an introduction
to their underlying mathematical foundations. As such, this book can be used as
a bridge toward homologation of these fields. By bringing these disciplines
together we may begin our journey toward understanding the nuances of the
genetic code.
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