Bioinformatics : principles and applications / by Harshawardhan P. Bal

The International Human Genome Project (IHGP), accomplished in 2003, was undoubtedly a giant step for mankind in the sequencing and assembly of the entire human genome. This event has fundamentally altered the manner in which we analyze biological systems, our approach to the many unsolved problems, and indeed, our attempt to unravel the closely held mysteries of evens the simplest of living organisms. However, deriving biological meaning from the raw stack of three billion bases of human DNA would not have been possible without the development of new algorithms for data mining and analysis. This book is about those fundamental tools and techniques that revolutionized biomedical research, and enable us today to perform biology in silico. The book uses an integrative approach to illustrate the use of these tools, and binds them together to create a coherent strategy to tackle the overwhelming problem of biological information overload. Divided into two parts, the book covers the core set of tools that have become indispensable to scientific discovery in the post-genome era, and also demonstrates how these tools can be integrated programmatically with BioPerl to be used in an enhanced, truly high throughput- biology on steroids- manner. With this coverage, the book will be useful to a diverse array of life science professionals, computational biologists, bioinformaticists, as well as students.