Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics is a field of study that integrates biological sciences with computer science. This book is the first of its kind written for students and teachers. It gives the readers an insight into genomics and proteomics including origin and history of bioinformatics, computer generations, their types and operating systems, role of PERL and JAVA as programming languages, central dogma of molecular biology, with structural details of DNA, RNA, and proteins and fundamental techniques used to study their structures, the database retrieval with PubMed, Entrez, SRS, OMIM, ExPASy, and EMBL, the BLAST and FASTA software packages to determine sequence matches, the computational methods for gene prediction, protein sequence databases, Swiss-Prot, PDB, software for visualization of protein structure, and the concepts of gene, genome and genomics with the prime role of GenBank, DDBJ, TIGR, KEGG genomics of bacteriophage to HGP, gene therapy, drug designing and pharmacogenomics. Several web pages with their specific URLs are provided that will definitely help readers to interact and learn more about cutting-edge research and visualize complex processes involved in bioinformatics.

Contents

Introduction Evolution of Computers Biological Macromolecules Basic Techniques in Bioinformatics Biological Databases Sequence Alignment Multiple Sequence Alignments Computational Gene Prediction Proteomics Genomics