Essential Computing Skills for Biologists

This is a handbook of methods and protocols for biologists. It aimed at undergraduate, graduate students and researchers originally trained in biological or medical sciences who need to know how to access the data archives of genomes, proteins, metabolites, gene expression profiles and the questions these data and tools can answer. For each chapter, the conceptual and experimental background is provided, together with specific guidelines for handling raw data, including preprocessing and analysis.

The content is structured into three parts. Part one introduces basic knowledge about popular bioinformatics tools, databases and web resources. Part two presents examples of omics bioinformatics applications. Part three provides basic statistical analysis skills and programming skills needed to handle and analyze omics datasets.

Readership: Senior undergraduate students, graduate students and scientists in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and related disciplines such as Biology, Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, Statistics and Chemistry.

Ziling Wang, MD, PhD. Graduated from the 4th Military Medical University, assistant dean of the Institute of Life Science and Bioengineering, School of Science, Beijing Jiaotong University. She has been Visiting Scholar in German Cancer Research Center for one year, and teaching Biochemistry and Molecular Biology for about 30 years. At the same time, she also carries out research work on tumor translational medicine, mainly on identifying the genomic and metabolic biomarkers for the responses and resistance to molecule-targeting agents in tumor by means of genomic and metabolomic analysis.

Lishu Zhang, PhD, Associate professor in the Institute of Life Science and Bioengineering, School of Science, Beijing Jiaotong University. Her research interest is genetic dissection of human complex diseases using genomics and integrated multi-omics data and bioinformatics methods. The complex disease she focuses on is osteoporosis. She has published about 20 research papers in international journals, including P Natl Acad Sci USA, J Bone Miner Res. The research work "the multi-omics and molecular mechanism research of osteoporosis" where she participated in won the second prize of the Natural Science Award of Hunan Province in 2005.