The bestselling introduction to bioinformatics and functional genomics—now in an updated edition

Widely received in its previous edition, Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics offers the most broad-based introduction to this explosive new discipline. Now in a thoroughly updated and expanded Second Edition, it continues to be the go-to source for students and professionals involved in biomedical research.

This edition provides up-to-the-minute coverage of the fields of bioinformatics and genomics. Features new to this edition include:

• Several fundamentally important proteins, such as globins, histones, insulin, and albumins, are included to better show how to apply bioinformatics tools to basic biological questions.
• A completely updated companion web site, which will be updated as new information becomes available - visit www.wiley.com/go/pevsnerbioinformatics
• Descriptions of genome sequencing projects spanning the tree of life.
• A stronger focus on how bioinformatics tools are used to understand human disease.

The book is complemented by lavish illustrations and more than 500 figures and tables—fifty of which are entirely new to this edition. Each chapter includes a Problem Set, Pitfalls, Boxes explaining key techniques and mathematics/statistics principles, Summary, Recommended Reading, and a list of freely available software. Readers may visit a related Web page for supplemental information at www.wiley.com/go/pevsnerbioinformatics.

Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics, Second Edition serves as an excellent single-source textbook for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate-level courses in the biological sciences and computer sciences. It is also an indispensable resource for biologists in a broad variety of disciplines who use the tools of bioinformatics and genomics to study particular research problems; bioinformaticists and computer scientists who develop computer algorithms and databases; and medical researchers and clinicians who want to understand the genomic basis of viral, bacterial, parasitic, or other diseases.

Praise for the first edition:

"...ideal both for biologists who want to master the application of bioinformatics to real-world problems and for computer scientists who need to understand the biological questions that motivate algorithms." Quarterly Review of Biology

"… an excellent textbook for graduate students and upper level undergraduate students." Annals of Biomedical Engineering

"…highly recommended for academic and medical libraries, and for researchers as an introduction and reference…" E-Streams

Now, for the book itself. It is easy to read and covers all aspects of bioinformatics from a sequence perspective (information retrieval, BLAST, gene expression and microarrays, proteomics and protein bioinformatics, genomes and disease). The coverage of databases and URLs is thourough and the text is easy to read, yet useful. The book is comprehensive with one area seemingly missing -- it would have been useful to include a chapter on systems biology and/or cellular modeling and the tools available (i.e. E-Cell). The book is especially useful to a researcher who is trying to explore all aspects of a particular gene, protein, disease, or pathway using bioinformatics tools.

The book is in stark contrast to the other Pevser (that is Pevzner) who wrote a bioinformatics book that surveyed algorithm theory underlying bioinformatics.

This book is also useful for less technical professionals in industry -- the managers, lawyers and venture capitalists that pervade the biotech landscape all need to communicate effectively and they can surely learn that here, provided they have some background in cell biology first.

9 of 9 found the following review helpful:


Excellent Learning Text, Well Written  Aug 24, 2010 By Shutterbug
I spent a lot of time looking for a bioinformatics text book that focuses on sequence analysis for a course I'm teaching. I decided that Mount's book was too wordy and unclear, and while I liked Orengo's book quite a bit, it required a good amount of knowledge up-front to follow it. Pevsner's book is laid out in a logical fashion and is designed to teach the molecular biology types the underlying principles of bioinformatics. It discusses pairwise alignments, substitution matrices, multiple sequence alignments, profiles, position-specific scoring matrices and phylogenetic trees with a good amount of detail. There's also a chapter on microarray analysis, but to get into that deeply I recommend Draghici's book.
The 2nd half of the book discusses the genome organization and evolution of a variety of organisms (viruses, bacteria, eukaryotes, human), and was great for bringing me up to date on these topics.
I strongly recommend this as a textbook for undergraduate or graduate students learning bioinformatics.

4 of 4 found the following review helpful:


Awesome book!!!  Jan 05, 2011 By FirZ
This book is great and give me a lot of information in bioinformatics and genomic tools. Since I am new in bioinformatics and genomics, I need a basic understanding as well as update in these areas and this book gave those to me.
In addition, the language using in this book is not difficult to understand, especially for a beginner (and those ones whose not use English as their main language).
I think you should try to read this book!! :)

3 of 3 found the following review helpful:


Excellent Text  Sep 11, 2010 By glenjarvis
This is the third Bioinformatics text that I have read in the past three years. And, this particular text is light year *ahead* of the others. It is dense, but it gives the background and big-picture that many of the others are lacking.

The text does not always flow - as if different sentences from different sources were thrown together without transition. As the text does cite many papers, this is acceptable. However, a review and small edits to help with the flow would make the book better.

Regardless, it's the best text on this subject that I am currently aware of.


one book for two subjects  Apr 15, 2011 By saltlake
this is a wonderful book which gives you two subjects. it helps to become a bioinformatics expert and computational biologist.

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