Saturday, 7 September 2013

A Computer Scientist’s Guide to Cell Biology

This book is designed specifically as a guide for Computer Scientists needing an introduction to Cell Biology. The text explores three different facets of biology: biological systems, experimental methods, and language and nomenclature. The author discusses what biologists are trying to determine from their experiments, how various experimental procedures are used and how they relate to accepted concepts in computer science, and the vocabulary necessary to read and understand current literature in biology. The book is an invaluable reference tool and an excellent starting point for a more comprehensive examination of cell biology.

There are book focuses on three parts.  One part of biology is information about biological systems. This is the focus of most introductory biological textbooks and overviews, and is the essence of what biologists actually study—what biologists are trying to determine from their experiments. However, it is not always what biologists spend most of their time talking about. If you pick up a typical biology paper, the conclusions are typically quite compact: often all the new information about biological systems in a paper appears in the title, and almost always it can be squeezed into the abstract. The bulk of the paper is about experimental methods and how they were used—this, and its consider to be the second part of “biology.” The third part of “biology” is the language and nomenclature used, which is rich, detailed, and highly impenetrable to mere laymen. To read and understand current literature in biology, it is necessary to have some background each of these three parts: core biology, experimental procedures, and the vocabulary.

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