Practical Bioinformatics is specifically designed for biology majors, with a heavy emphasis on the steps required to perform bioinformatics analysis to answer biological questions. It is written for courses that have a practical, hands-on element and contains many exercises (for example, database searches, protein analysis, data interpretation) to complement the straightforward and practical topics. The chapters are focused on DNA, RNA, and protein sequence analysis—frequently performed subsets of the field of bioinformatics—taking the reader through the commonly asked question “what can I learn about this sequence?”

A special note to established scientists: new genomic sequences are being published at an accelerating pace. Although new technology has led to unprecedented accuracy of the sequence, incomplete and challenging assemblies along with imperfect predictive methods are still generating gene models that require verification. With the sequence analysis skills learned from this book, features such as missing exons and incorrect termini can be easily recognized and more accurate gene models can be constructed.