Introduction to Bioinformatics

Discusses the basics of bioinformatics which has become an important part of the course curricula in UG and PG courses in a number of universities. Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary subject and requires knowledge of physics, chemistry, mathematics, statistics, biology, and computer science. The book is written considering the problems faced by students of different backgrounds.

Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary subject which uses the knowledge of Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Statistics, Mathematics and Computer Science. It deals with the building and development of Biological Databases and Software tools. It uses the power of computations to analyze and solve biological problems. The prerequisites for Bioinformatics study are good quality computers with high processing speeds. However, the analyses and interpretations of the Biological data require human intervention. Bioinformatics is largely but not exclusively a computer based study. Computers are needed to perform the repetitive tasks that are at the core of many Bioinformatics analyses. Computers are also needed for their abilities to solve problems. The bioinformatics study focuses primarily on the following aspects:

- Database creation for storage and management of large biological data
- Development of algorithms and statistics to analyze the relationships between various types of biological data
- Use of the software tools to come up with new biological hypothesis and to provide biological insights into the biological phenomenon

This book is meant for the Bachelors and Masters students of Bioinformatics. The second chapter of the book deals with the popular and important biological databases. The third chapter focuses on the biological sequence alignment methods. The fourth chapter presents the molecular modelling techniques and the last chapter presents the Phylogenetic analyses.