Methods in Computational Biology

The field of computational biology, or bioinformatics as it is often called, was born just a few years ago. It is difficult to pinpoint its exact beginnings, but it is easy to see that the field is currently undergoing rapid, exciting growth. This growth has been fuelled by a revolution in DNA sequencing and mapping technology, which has been accompanied by rapid growth in many related areas of biology and biotechnology. No doubt many exciting breakthroughs are yet to come. All this new DNA and protein sequence data brings with it the tremendously exciting challenge of how to make sense of it: how to turn the raw sequences into information that will lead to new drugs, new advances in health care, and a better overall understanding of how living organisms function. One of the primary tools for making sense of this revolution in sequence data is the computer. Computational biology is all about how to use the power of computation to model and understand biological systems and especially biological sequence data. This book is written keeping in mind the graduates and researchers studying life sciences using computational techniques. Although, it can also be used by undergraduates as a spring board for exploring the field of Computational Biology. This could serve as a supplement for people involved in specialized research. With the flood of genomics and proteomics data, it is imperative that students in biology have a basic understanding of the data generated and how it is processed using computation. The algorithms could be graded from simple to complex, based on the assumptions employed. In this book, our focus will be to understand the most commonly used algorithms in biology and also take a peek at the latest developments in genomics based computational advances.

This book is an attempt to bring together in one place some of the latest advances in computational biology. With this in mind, we have included tutorials on many of the key topics in the volume, designed to introduce biological scientists to some of the computational techniques that might otherwise be unfamiliar to them. Many of those tutorials are interweaved with the main body of the chapters, which provides a nice hands-on experience to the reader. It is expected that the...