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Biology has progressed tremendously in the last decade due in part to the
increased automation in the generation of data from sequences to genotypes to
phenotypes. Biology is now very much an information science, and bioinformatics
provides the means to connect biological data to hypotheses. Within this volume,
we have collated chapters describing various areas of applied bioinformatics,
from the analysis of sequence, literature, and functional data to the function and
evolution of organisms. The ability to process and interpret large volumes of
data is essential with the application of new high throughput DNA sequencers
providing an overload of sequence data. Initial chapters provide an introduction
to the analysis of DNA and protein sequences, from motif detection to gene
prediction and annotation, with specific chapters on DNA and protein databases as
well as data visualization. Additional chapters focus on gene expression analysis
from the perspective of traditional microarrays and more recent sequence-based
approaches, followed by an introduction to the evolving field of phenomics, with
specific chapters detailing advances in plant and microbial phenome analysis and
a chapter dealing with the important issue of standards for functional genomics.
Further chapters present the area of literature databases and associated mining
tools which are becoming increasingly essential to interpret the vast volume of
published biological information, while the final chapters present bioinformatics
purely from a developer’s point of view, describing the various data and databases
as well as common programming languages used for bioinformatics applications.
These chapters provide an introduction and motivation to further avenues for
implementation. Together, this volume aims to provide a resource for biology
students wanting a greater understanding of the encroaching area of bioinformatics,
as well as computer scientists who are interested learning more about the field of
applied bioinformatics. |
