Foreword

Bioinformatics has come a long way since it entered the ‘world stage’ with the publication of the first bacterial genome sequence in Science in 1995. That publication showcased the power of computer programs in assembling a genome sequence with more than a million base pairs and making sense of the sequence through the process of annotation. These two tasks remain active areas of investigation, but bioinformatics research now encompasses many other topics, several of which are covered in this book. We are now more than 15 years into the ‘big data revolution’, in which molecular biology is playing an important part. Harris Lewin from the University of California at Davis has suggested that ‘genomic amount of data’ is a better reference than the usual ‘astronomical amount of data,’ for describing huge datasets in various fields. It goes without saying that huge amounts of data require huge advances in the methods for processing these data. That explains why machine learning, pattern analysis, error correction, and novel statistical techniques continue to play crucial roles in biological discovery, and all of them are explored in chapters of this book. CONTINUE READING…..