Provides a guide to the field of Bioinformatics and takes reader from first principles through to an understanding of computational techniques and algorithms. It introduces the basics of nucleic acids, proteins and databases. Its each chapter uses mind-maps and flow diagrams to give an overview of conceptual links within each topic.

Part 1: Background Basics 1. The Nucleic Acid World 2. Protein Structure 3. Dealing with Databases Part 2: Sequence Alignments 4. Producing and Analyzing Sequence Alignments 5. Pairwise Sequence Alignment and Database Searching 6. Patterns, Profiles, and Multiple Alignments Part 3: Evolutionary Processes 7. Recovering Evolutionary History 8. Building Phylogenetic Trees Part 4: Genome Characteristics 9. Revealing Genome Features 10. Gene Detection and Genome Annotation Part 5: Secondary Structures 11. Obtaining Secondary Structure from Sequence 12. Predicting Secondary Structures Part 6: Tertiary Structures 13. Modeling Protein Structure 14. Analyzing Structure-Function Relationships Part 7: Cells and Organisms 15. Proteome and Gene Expression Analysis 16. Clustering Methods and Statistics 17. Systems Biology Appendices: Background Theory Appendix A. Probability, Information, and Bayesian Analysis Appendix B. Molecular Energy Functions Appendix C. Function Optimization

"Congratulations on a fine book! I do not think I have seen such a comprehensive text on bioinformatics algorithms and techniques before. I think this will be an invaluable resource for the bioinformatics community and researchers of neighbouring disciplines." - Jaap Heringa, Free University, Amsterdam "Many of the students in our program could benefit from reading this guide to genetics and molecular biology terms. Chapter 1 was well organized and easy to follow … I found that the illustrations were familiar and depicted the concepts well." - Sudha Iyengar, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, USA "I found Chapter 6 to be a very detailed and informative overview of multiple alignment and pattern discovery methods for biological sequences. The level of detail was good, as were most of the explanations of the methods. I would use this chapter in an undergraduate course in bioinformatics." - Tim Bailey, University of Queensland, Australia"This is very well done. Compared to other competing textbooks, your book will be probably the first one that explains gene finding in detail." - Sun Kim, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA"This chapter is nicely done, an easy read for an upperclassman or graduate student. The chapter reads as a How-To in protein structure prediction." - Chris Bystroff, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, USA, writing about Chapter 13"I enjoyed reading this chapter, and commend the authors on a well presented and explained introduction to the main algorithms and issues of analyzing this sort of data. The figures are useful and relevant and the techniques presented give a very good representation of the main algorithms in what is a diverse area of analysis.I believe this chapter to be at a great level for biology graduates, and in fact any student who has not been exposed to data mining concepts previously. I commend that the algorithms have been placed in a biological contexts wherever possible making the concepts more accessible." - Jen Taylor, University of Oxford, UK, writing about Chapter 16