A.4 Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics is a relatively new discipline that's attracting a lot of attention, so the available resources are multiplying fairly quickly. Here are a few books and other resources to help get you started.

A.4.1 Books

Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills, by Cynthia Gibas and Per Jambeck, O'Reilly & Associates. This is a really good book for beginners. It covers setting up a Linux workstation and the installation and use of many of the best, and least expensive, bioinformatics programs. It teaches how to use bioinformatics programs, not how to program. It's the most practical bioinformatics book available.

Introduction to Computational Biology: Maps, Sequences and Genomes; by Michael S. Waterman; CRC Press. This is a classic book with a predominantly statistical outlook.

Bioinformatics: A Practical Guide to the Analysis of Genes and Proteins, Second Edition; edited by Andreas D. Baxecvanis and B.F. Francis Ouellette; John Wiley & Sons. Includes chapters on a wide range of topics by several authors.

A.4.2 Governmental Organizations

Absolutely essential. The following web sites are for the most important government-sponsored bioinformatics organizations:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/:

the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). The U.S. government center.

http://www.embl.org/:

the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). The European Union laboratory.

http://www.ebi.ac.uk/:

the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) of EMBL.

A.4.3 Conferences

Bioinformatics has long been a part of various biology conferences, for instance the Cold Spring Harbor conferences on sequencing. Now there are many conferences with such coverage, often under the heading of "genomics." Here are a few interesting conferences:

• ISMB: Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology, now in its ninth year

• Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, http://www.bioinformatics.org/

• RECOMB: Conference on Computational Molecular Biology