Bioinformatics for Dummies

by Cedric Notredame and Jean-Michel Claverie

Book Overview

Were you always curious about biology but were afraid to sit through long hours of dense reading? Did you like the subject when you were in high school but had other plans after you graduated? Now you... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0764516965
• ISBN13: 9780764516962
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: For Dummies
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Good

I am a couple years into a PhD in bioinformatics, but this is the book I started with. I knew some biology and some computer science, but I still found a lot of the databases, etc. confusing and the field has a decided lack of simplified documentation (though it is getting better). Of course, bioinformatics is a pretty broad topic and no book could possibly cover everything. If you do not know any biology at all you probably should also get a basic text on genetics/molecular biology (or read thema at the NCBI web site books section for free). You don't need anything in depth to read the dummies book, just at the level of an introductory biology book. Hint: DNA to RNA, RNA to Protein. And you want to know why proteins are similar because proteins with similar amino acid sequences often have similar chemical properties and therefore similar functions, so if you know what one protein does you can guess what a protein like it probably does. :-) And despite the name of the book the authors are REAL bioinformaticists (T-Coffee rocks!)

Yes, It's Really Written at the For Dummies Level.

This book kind of blew me away. Bioinformatics is such a big word. Then in the second chapter they tell you 'How Most People Use Bioinformatics.' And all of a sudden they have you on line to the National Library of Medicine at the National Institute of Health. They have you looking at protein sequences, and you even understand what they are saying. This is a 'For Dummies' book. It is written in their traditional style, assuming that you know very little -- well to be sure they say they are making the assumption that 'You likely have a background in molecular biology. If you don't - or if you need to brush up on your molecular biology - Chapter 1 gives you a brief overview of the basics.' I found that the first few chapters went down pretty easily. By part IV it had gone further than I wanted to go, and I quit reading. BUT if I were going to be taking a course in bioinformatics, or even thinking about taking such a course, or just looking at a degree in biology, I'd spend a week or two getting around this book. It's written a hell of a lot better than any text you're likely to get assigned, and at its price it's quite a deal.

great beginner

In spite of the title (I don't know many dummies interested in multiple sequence alignments) this reference is written by experts in the field of bioinformatics and is very accessable for the beginner. I purchased this book as a beginning graduate student so that I could learn which programs to use to compare amino acid and nucleic acid sequences as well as prepare them for publication and this book was perfect for this end. This text doesn't delve into the algorithms or much theory (which is learned through practice and other sources), nevertheless, I recommend this for the researcher for a crash course or quick reference. This book really helped me get my feet wet in this area (and recently publish a nice alignment) and will certainly reduce my workload next semester for my bioinformatics course!

Bioinformatics for Dummies by J.M. Claverie & C. Notredame

"Bioinformatics for Dummies" is an excellent resource. It is clear, easy to read, well organized and illustrated. I was particularly pleased by the colloquial tone of the writing: in addition to being informative, it was fun to read!As a scientist who spends at least half of my time BLASTing, I also read it for accuracy and found it to almost error-free (any errors were in the figures). Additionally, most of the web pages were up-to-date, although as time passes the links will decay and web pages will change their look. In addition, the book contained enough in-depth content to teach me several new tricks of the trade. Further, I believe the book had sufficient background material to educate the novice. To test this, I gave the manual to a material science chemist and he was able to understand the material, at least until he decided it was more than he wanted to know and quit reading.This is a useful text for those who want to know more than an operational definition of bioinformatics and a must for the library of all bioinformatics users.

A great resource for teachers too!

I have used databases before (mostly NCBI, TIGR and SWISS PROT) and yet, this book (presumably for dummies) has shown me so much more(which say a lot about me)! It is accurate and gives good step by step guide to how to perform many tasks - from how to find a gene to using the analysis tools and to exploring some of the newer features of these databases - and the areas like you have never looked into before. It is a well-researched book and the authors are clearly knowledgeable in this area.Even though I have been for a 4-day bioinformatics course (6 months ago), which I thought was pretty good, this book still had so much to offer. Using this book, I was easily able to substitute the proteins of my interest into their examples and generated meaningful hits.The book also covers deeper and more advanced features of BLAST, discusses sequence alignments using several types of algorithm and even has a section on 3D structures. Towards the end of book - it features a section on working with mRNA and building phylogenetics trees - which again are excellent resources for teachers involved in teaching beginners molecular biology.I am a teacher teaching at a Pre-unversity level. The way the book is structured also lends its material to be modified into lesson materials for training students. It is really a great book! Worth every dollar I spent on it!