The Practical Bioinformatician

Book excerpt: Computer scientists have increasingly been enlisted as "bioinformaticians" to assist molecular biologists in their research. This book is a practical introduction to bioinformatics for these computer scientists. The chapters are in-depth discussions by expert bioinformaticians on both general techniques and specific approaches to a range of selected bioinformatics problems. The book is organized into clusters of chapters on the following topics: - Overview of modern molecular biology and a broad spectrum of techniques from computer science -- data mining, machine learning, mathematical modeling, sequence alignment, data integration, workflow development, etc. - In-depth discussion of computational recognition of functional and regulatory sites in DNA sequences. - Incisive discussion of computational prediction of secondary structure of RNA sequences. - Overview of computational prediction of protein cellular localization, and selected discussions of inference of protein function. - Overview of methods for discovering protein-protein interactions. - Detailed discussion of approaches to gene expression analysis for the diagnosis of diseases, the treatment of diseases, and the understanding of gene functions. - Case studies on analysis of phylogenies, functional annotation of proteins, construction of purposebuilt integrated biological databases, and development of workflows underlying the large-scale-effort gene discovery. - Written in a practical, in-depth tutorial style - Covers a broad range of bioinformatics topics and of techniques used in bioinformatics - Comprehensive overviews of the development of various approaches in a number of selectedtopics - In-depth exposition of a number of important topics - Contributions by prominent researchers: Vladimir Bajic, Ming Li, Kenta Nakai, Limsoon Wong, Cathy Wu, etc. - Extensive, integrated references to background liter