This text is designed to get you quickly over the Perl language barrier by approaching programming as an important new laboratory skill, revealing Perl programs and techniques that are immediately useful in the lab. Each chapter focuses on solving a particular bioinformatics problem.

BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool), is a software package for rapid searching of nucleotide and protein databases. BLAST offers biologists, computational biology students, and bioinformatics professionals a clear understanding of BLAST as well as the science it supports.

Describes a range of string problems in computer science and molecular biology and the algorithms developed to solve them.

Provides an introduction to the modern approximation techniques and explains how, why, and when the techniques can be expected to work. This book focuses on building students' intuition to help them understand why the techniques presented work in general, and why, in some situations, they fail.

This work analyzes biological functions in terms of the network of interacting molecules and genes with the aim of understanding how a biological system is organized. It aims to provide a conceptual framework and practical methods for the representation and computation of molecular networks.

Advances in computers and biotechnology have had a profound impact on biomedical research, and as a result complex data sets can be generated to address extremely complex biological questions. This book covers biological topics including sequence analysis, BLAST, microarray analysis, gene finding, and the analysis of evolutionary processes.