Bioinformatics and the Cell is the first book with comprehensive numerical illustration of mathematical techniques and computational algorithms used in bioinformatics to convert the rapidly increasing molecular data into organized biological knowledge, with a focus on interactions among DNA, RNA and proteins in the cell.
By rendering both mathematics and biology to numbers, this book should appeal not only to biologists, but also to mathematicians, biostatisticians, and computational scientists, especially those younger ones with an ambition to conquer the rough terrain of bioinformatics.
BLAST and FASTA.- Sequence Alignment.- Contig Assembly.- DNA Replication and Viral Evolution.- Gene and Motif Prediction.- Hidden Markov Models.- Gibbs Sampler.- Bioinformatics and Vertebrate Mitochondria.- Characterizing Translation Efficiency.- Protein Isoelectric Point.- Bioinformatics and Two-Dimensional Protein Separation.- Self-Organizing Map and Other Clustering Algorithms.- Molecular Phylogenetics.- Fundamentals of Proteomics.
Dr. Xuhua Xia obtained his PhD in population biology at University of Western Ontario in 1990 and made his entry into molecular evolution and phylogenetics at University of Washington in 1993. He was recruited by University of Hong Kong in 1996 as an assistant professor, and served as a senior scientist and the founding head of the Bioinformatics Laboratory of HKU-Pasteur Research Centre. Dr. Xia joined University of Ottawa in 2002 where he is cross-appointed to both Biology Department and the School of Information Technology Engineering. He is an active member in the Center for Advanced Research in Environmental Genomics and the Ottawa Institute of Systems Biology. His web site is at http://dambe.bio.uottawa.ca.
From the reviews: "In this book the author makes an 'effort to render both mathematical equations and biology to numbers'. ! he works out a lot of illustrative examples to make biologists understand the mathematics and computational scientists understand the biology of a wide range of problems in bioinformatics. ! The book is addressed to graduate students majoring in sciences and software engineering. Biologists with a sound knowledge of computer programming should be able to implement the presented algorithms in their own programs." (Wiebke Werft, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1166, 2009)