Saturday, 7 September 2013

Bioinformatics: A Practical Guide to the Analysis of Genes and Proteins; Second Edition

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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