Product Description

Life in a post-genomic age has the promise to revolutionize our understanding of how our genes shape who we are, how our genome evolved, and how we function. There are new possibilities for an improved quality of life as we exploit new knowledge to design novel, more effective drugs. Central to these possibilities being realized is one of the most important information-gathering, data-mining, and knowledge-building tools in current research and healthcare development: bioinformatics. An Introduction to Bioinformatics introduces students to the immense power of bioinformatics as a set of scientific tools. The book explains how to access the data archives of genomes and proteins, and the kinds of questions these data and tools can answer: how to make inferences from the data archives, to make connections among them, and to derive useful and interesting predictions. Blending factual content with many opportunities for active learning, Introduction to Bioinformatics offers a truly reader-friendly way to get to grips with this subject, making it the ideal resource for anyone new to the field. Online Resource Centre: The Online Resource Centre features the following materials: For lecturers (password protected): · Figures from the book available to download, to facilitate lecture slide preparation For students: · Hyperlinked bibliography - online links to articles referenced in the book, encouraging student engagement with the primary literature · Links to PDB structures of all proteins cited in the book, to enable students to investigate the 3D structures of proteins in a visual, interactive way · Data from the book in computer-readable form, which is available for instant use to facilitate hands-on learning by the student - Guidance to help students answer problems from the text, to support and encourage self-directed learning

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #98885 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

About the Author
Dr Arthur Lesk, Senior Research Associate, Department of Haematology, University of Cambridge, UK

Customer Reviews

An excellent beginner's guide to bioinformatics
This is a superb introduction to the subject of bioinformatics. It is very well written, and for the first time (thanks to this book) I can understand what hidden Markov models are about. It invites comparison with another book of the same name, namely "Introduction to Bioinformatics" by Attwood and Parry-Smith. The book by Lesk has two advantages (three, I suppose, if you include the fact that it is a more recent publication): it uses everyday, non-biological analogies to explain many of the concepts that are otherwise difficult to grasp, and it also covers molecular modelling.

Advanced undergraduate students tackling bioinformatics for the first time, or research students whose experience of bioinformatics is limited to the odd BLAST search and surfing through genomes, will find this book a must have. You will wonder how you ever got by without it.

A great introductory book
This is an excellent introduction to this up-and-coming field. Bioinformatics one of many fields that is inherently inter-disciplinary, with biologists coming in and needing to learn computer science, and computer scientists coming in and needing to learn biology. I think that the book is very useful for both groups. I have a computer science background and did not find any of the biology overly difficult. So I highly recommend it for anyone, from the undergraduate to the postrgraduate or professional.

The book covers all of the major topics in bioinformatics, and touches on several of the minor ones. There are 5 long chapters:
Chapter 1 Introduction: introduces the basics of the field, describing the basics of data archiving, the WWW, computers and computer programming, biological classification and nomenclature, phylogenetic relationships and use of sequences, PSI-BLAST, and protein structure.
Chapter 2 Genome organization and evolution: genomics and proteomics, methods of genetic information transmission, genes and genomes, SNPs, genome evolution.
Chapter 3 Archives and information retrieval: this contains a detailed discussion of various databases and how to interact with them.
Chapter 4 Alignments and phylogenetic trees: this vast majority of this chapter covers many aspects of the important area of sequence alignment, including BLAST and HMMs. Then it has short sections on phylogeny and phylogenetic trees, again covering the basics.
Chapter 5 Protein structure and drug discovery: this starts with protein folding, and deals with hydrophobicity, structural alignments, DALI, and then evolution, classification and prediction of protein structures and function. Finally it touches on drug discovery in this context.

One of the nice things about this book is the code samples, written in the bioinformatician's favorite language, Perl. These are printed and discussed in the book, but then also available on the web site that is associated with the book, so you don't have to type it in yourself. In addition to the programs, the website also has graphics from the book, many of which rotate so you can see them from different positions (can't get that in a book!). It also has the web links mentioned in the book, so you can explore them more conveniently than having to flip through the book and type the URLs in.

Fantastic Book !!
This books is one of the greatest books in Bioinformatics. Actually, I attended one week seminar given by Prof. Lesk. His presentation of this material cannot be described. It was tremendous !