Author Profile

Heitor S. Lopes is an Associate Professor at Federal University of Technology Paran - UTFPR (Brazil). He graduated in Electronic Engineering (1984) and got a MSc degree in Biomedical Engineering (1990), and a PhD in Information Sciences (1996). In 1998 he founded the Bioinformatics Laboratory at UTFPR and since then bioinformatics is one of his main area of research, with special interest in: protein structure prediction methods and algorithms as well as high-performance computing for bioinformatics applications. He has served as a member of program committees of many international conferences and editorial boards of scientific journals. Since 2002, Dr. Lopes holds a research grant from the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq) in the area of Computer Science.

About The Book

Nowadays it is difficult to imagine an area of knowledge that can continue developing without the use of computers and informatics. It is not different with biology, that has seen an unpredictable growth in recent decades, with the rise of a new discipline, bioinformatics, bringing together molecular biology, biotechnology, and information technology. More recently, the development of high throughput techniques, such as microarray, mass spectrometry and DNA sequencing, has increased the need of computational support to collect, store, retrieve, analyze, and correlate huge data sets of complex information. On the other hand, the growth of the computational power for processing and storage has also increased the necessity for deeper knowledge in the field. The development of bioinformatics has allowed now the emergence of systems biology, the study of the interactions between the components of a biological system, and how these interactions give rise to the function and behaviour of a living being. This book presents some theoretical issues, reviews, and a variety of bioinformatics applications. Computational Biology aims to provide life scientists and students the skills necessary for research in a data-rich world. The text covers accessing and using remote servers via the command-line, writing programs and pipelines for data analysis, and provides useful vocabulary for interdisciplinary work. This textbook is for anyone who needs to learn the basics of bioinformatics -the use of computational methods to better understand biological systems. Computational Biology covers the principles and applications of the computational methods used to study DNA, RNA, and proteins, including using biological databases such as NCBI and UniProt; performing BLAST, sequence alignments, and structural predictions; and creating phylogenetic trees. It includes a primer that can be used as a jumping off point for learning computer programming for bioinformatics. This text can be used as a self-study guide, as a course focused on computational methods in biology/bioinformatics, or to supplement general courses that touch on topics included within the book. This book targets both students and professionals in the life sciences. While it is aimed at beginners, it also provides valuable tips and tricks for experienced researchers dealing with large datasets.

Table of Contents

Preface
Chapter 1. Introduction to Computational Biology
Chapter 2. Biological Databases
Chapter 3. Sequence Alignment and Analysis
Chapter 4. Genomics and Computational Approaches
Chapter 5. Transcriptomics and Gene Expression
Chapter 6. Proteomics and Protein Structure
Chapter 7. Systems Biology
Chapter 8. Phylogenetics and Evolutionary Analysis
Chapter 9. Computational Modeling and Simulation
Bibliography
Index.