Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics [Paperback]

Jonathan Pevsner (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0471210048 | ISBN-13: 978-0471210047 | Publication Date: November 4, 2003 | Edition: 1

Wiley is proud to announce the publication of the first ever broad-based textbook introduction to Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics by a trained biologist, experienced researcher, and award-winning instructor. In this new text, author Jonathan Pevsner, winner of the 2001 Johns Hopkins University "Teacher of the Year" award, explains problem-solving using bioinformatic approaches using real examples such as breast cancer, HIV-1, and retinal-binding protein throughout. His book includes 375 figures and over 170 tables. Each chapter includes: Problems, discussion of Pitfalls, Boxes explaining key techniques and math/stats principles, Summary, Recommended Reading list, and URLs for freely available software. The text is suitable for professionals and students at every level, including those with little to no background in computer science.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"…provides non-trivial tools and biological motivations to learn bioinformatics." (Journal of Statistical Computation & Simulation, January 2005)

"...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, March-May 2005)

"…this appears to be an excellent textbook for graduate students and upper level undergraduate students." (Annals of Biomedical Engineering, July 2004, 32, 7)

"…highly recommended for academic and medical libraries, and for researchers as an introduction and reference…" (E-Streams, Vol. 7, No. 4)

“...an intriguing work targeted toward biologists wanting to solve problems...provides a compendium of many biological insights and breakthroughs and will be a useful resource...highly recommended.” (Choice, Vol. 41, No. 7, March 2004)

Review

"I was particularly impressed by the comprehensible and comprehensive treatment of BLAST - the best that I have seen. One is guided from choosing the appropriate type of BLAST program, database and search parameters through to refining and analysing the significance of the search results--all illustrated with clear examples."
--David P. Leader, University of Glasgow

"I would not hesitate for a moment to propose Jonathan Pevsner’s new book as a standard course for biologists who need a serious, practical knowledge of modern bioinformatics. Dr. Pevsner does a masterful job at presenting virtually every major topic in bioinformatics and computational genomics, from the basics of sequence analysis, to microarray data classification, accurately and at a considerable level of detail but without any complex mathematics. In addition to being an extremely useful textbook, Pevsner’s book is a very nice read, due in large part, to carefully constructed questions and suggestions for discussion, and wonderful historical vignettes. In short, a great bioinformatics book for biologists!"
--Eugene V. Koonin, Ph.D., National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 800 pages
• Publisher: Wiley-Liss; 1 edition (November 4, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471210048
• ISBN-13: 978-0471210047
• Product Dimensions: 10.7 x 8.3 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #238,327 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #30 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Biological Sciences > Bioinformatics

More About the Author

Jonathan Pevsner received his Ph.D. in Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences at Johns Hopkins (1989), and pursued postdoctoral training at Stanford University (1989-1995) in the Dept. of Molecular and Cellular Physiology. He joined the faculty of the Department of Neurology at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore where he is currently an Associate Professor. His primary faculty appointment is in the Dept. of Neuroscience in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Dr. Pevsner began teaching courses in bioinformatics and genomics at Johns Hopkins in 2000, and he won Teacher of the Year awards twice in the School of Medicine (2001, 2006), once at the Homewood campus MLA program (2009), and he was given the Professor's Award for Excellence in Teaching (2003). In 2003 John Wiley & Sons published the first edition of Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics, and the second edition was published in 2009.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent for bioinformatics from a user's perspective, March 9, 2004

By 

Edwin R. Addison (Wilmington, NC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics (Paperback)

Unlike the previous review, I found the user perspective, rather than the mathematical perspective refreshing. I have been teaching bioinformatics to CS students for several years and all too often the students are great at algorithms and theory but do not understand the user they are designing for. This book teaches just that -- how to use bioinformatics from a user or researcher's viewpoint. Medical students and biologists will find it useful for direct applicability to their work, but I also reccomend it for bioinformatics students who need to complement their theoretical background with practical use. All too often, CS students of bioinformatics can design a great database with powerful access tools, but with a horrible interface because they don't have this perspective.

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.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Learning Text, Well Written, August 24, 2010

By 

Shutterbug (Coeur d'Alene, ID USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics (Paperback)

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 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome book!!!, January 5, 2011

By 

FirZ - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics (Paperback)

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!! :)