Practical Biology

The growth in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology fields over the last few years has been remarkable and the trend is to increase its pace. In fact, the need for computational techniques that can efficiently handle the huge amounts of data produced by the new experimental techniques in Biology is still increasing driven by new advances in Next Generation Sequencing, several types of the so called omics data and image acquisition, just to name a few. The analysis of the datasets that produces and its integration call for new algorithms and approaches from fields such as Databases, Statistics, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Optimization, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. Within this scenario of increasing data availability, Systems Biology has also been emerging as an alternative to the reductionist view that dominated biological research in the last decades.

This greatly expanded 2nd edition provides a practical introduction to
- data processing with Linux tools and the programming languages AWK and Perl
- data management with the relational database system MySQL, and
- data analysis and visualization with the statistical computing environment R

The success of Bioinformatics in recent years has been prompted by research in mole- lar biology and medicine in initiatives like the human genome project. The volume and diversification of data has increased so much that it is very hard if not impossible to analyze it by human experts. The analysis of this growing body of data, intensified by the development of a number of high-throughput experimental techniques that are generating the so called 'omics' data, has prompted for new computational methods. New global approaches, such as Systems Biology, have been emerging replacing the reductionist view that dominated biology research in the last decades, requiring the coordinated efforts of biological researchers with those related to data analysis, mathematical modelling and computer science.