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 purpose-built integrated biological databases, and development of workflows underlying the large-scale-effort gene discovery.
