Bioinformatics in the Post-Genomic Era: Genome, Transcriptome, Proteome, and Information-Based Medicine

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 408 pages
• Published by: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Edition: 1st Edition September 6, 2004
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0321173864
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0321173867
• Book Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 1.3 inches
• Weighs: 1.7 pounds

Product Description
During the past decade advanced computing technologies have revolutionizedlife sciences and medical research. The changes are not only dramatic, but theyhave affected virtually everyone in life sciences. Information technology isaccelerating the drug discovery and testing process. Most current books onbioinformatics either lack technical depth, or focus on a specific narrow topic.Jeff Augen's book is the first overview with both broad coverage that doesjustice to the extent of this new field while at the same time having enoughdepth to be of practical use to working professionals. It surveys the mostrecent cutting-edge developments, offering enough technical information to beuseful without overloading the reader or quickly becoming obsolete.

Back Cover Copy


"Augen's book provides a thorough review of bioinformatics that presages the coming era of information-based medicine."
-John Reynders, VP of Informatics, Celera Genomics

"Augen is to be congratulated on producing an indispensable book. He not only lays out and explains the essential tools in bioinformatics, but he also validates the critical role that computational biology will play in the future of medical research. This is a magnificent achievement-there is something here for novice and expert alike."
-Kevin Davies, Editor-in-Chief, Bio-IT World

"Jeff has created an erudite, yet amazingly accessible overview of the intersection between biology, biomedicine, and high-performance computing."
-Andrea Califano, Director, Genome Center Bioinformatics, Columbia University

"This book is essential for anyone wishing to understand the information technology transformation of the life sciences."
-W.R. Pulleyblank, Director, Deep Computing Institute, IBM Research

"Because of its very broad scope, Jeff Augen's new book has the capacity to deliver value to a wide variety of audiences. As a longtime investor in biotechnology and healthcare, I find the discussions surrounding the future of medicine and information technology particularly interesting and useful."
-G. Steven Burrill, Chief Executive Officer, Burrill and Company

"Augen takes you on a complete guided tour of computational biology, combining historical perspectives with discussions of the leading-edge technologies being employed today. This book would be useful for anyone in the field. It provides an entire overview to scientists new to computational biology, while giving experts detailed information about new developments in the field."
-Salvatore Salamone, Senior IT Editor, Bio-IT World and Health-IT World

"There are books about bioinformatics with a focus on information technology and books on molecular biology with a focus on bioscience, but I am not aware of any book that provides a summary of basics of both bioscience and information science with a technical bridge between the two disciplines. This book is unique in covering theoretical and practical aspects of bioinformatics. Everyone from biologists and geneticists to computer scientists and engineers will benefit from Augen's book."
-O.K. Baek, Chief Architect, Biomedical Informatics and Information-Based Medicine, IBM

Today, advances in high-performance computing, data management, and the Internet are transforming many aspects of biomedical research and have produced a new generation of tools for studying gene and protein sequences, macromolecular structures, and metabolic systems. These tools have greatly accelerated the drug discovery and testing process and promise to change the way diseases are predicted and treated in the future.

Bioinformatics in the Post-Genomic Era is the first comprehensive look at the role of information technology in biological and medical research. Bridging these two disciplines, the book's structure parallels the flow of biological information from gene to message, protein, and metabolic system. Along the way, industry expert Jeff Augen covers both theoretical and practical aspects of bioinformatics, giving readers a vision of the future of medical research while providing technical details working professionals can use today.

• Inside, you will find in-depth information on the following:
• Gene and protein sequence databases
• Bioinformatic tools
• Transcription profiling
• The proteome and the protein translation process
• Protein structure prediction
• Medical informatics and information-based medicine
• Little-discussed topics such as transcription profiling of minor messages and pattern-discovery algorithms and neural networks
• Cutting-edge developments such as high-throughput whole-genome sequencing, systems biology, and presymptomatic disease prediction.

Designed for both biomedical researchers and students, this book will become an indispensable aid to anyone seeking to understand the links between information technology, molecular biology, and clinical medicine.

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Reader Reviews
Bioinformatics is the science of biological information, namely sequences and metadata about organisms and sequences. What's interesting about this field to many people, both in the sciences and outside of it, is the large volume of data that gets analyzed and the results that emerge on a daily basis. Obviously interesting for the medical advances and the rapidly growing business in the life sciences, there's a complex field that has developed in the past ten years or so. And following the sequencing of the human genome, new challenges have arisen for everyone involved. Augen's Bioinformatics provides a good introduction to this new field of research for students in the sciences, and anyone with a decent undergraduate education in modern biology. I think that this accessibility of the material is one of the book's biggest winning points. After an introduction to the book and the subject area of bioinformatics (chapters 1 and 2), Augen begins at the level of the structure of a gene (chapter 3). Here, anyone with an undergraduate level understanding of genetics or molecular biology can begin using the book and bridging the gap to the new areas of modern bioinformatics. Augen then describes how basic sequence analysis is performed at the DNA sequence level (in chapter 4). The material in Bioinformatics covers some of the higher-level methods for sequence analysis, including hidden Markov models, neural networks, and pattern discovery, and introduces some of the common algorithms found to do this analysis. Chapter 5 then covers transcription, the process of going from DNA to mRNA. Beginning with the biology behind this activity (the ribosome and the larger "transcriptome"), Bioinformatics then describes how you would perform transcriptional analysis. Here, Augen shows how you go from a wet lab to a computational lab and describes what classes of experiments you perform to gather data and then what kinds of analysis you perform on it. This chapter introduces some of the more common clustering techniques for data aggregation and understanding. The next step in the DNA -