Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics, Second Edition

Foreword

Ask 10 investigators in human genetics what resources they need most and it is highly likely that computational skills and tools will be at the top of the list. Genomics, with its reliance on microarrays, genotyping, high throughput sequencing and the like, is intensely data-rich and for this reason is impossible to disentangle from bioinformatics. This text, with its clear descriptions, practical examples and focus on the overlaps and interdependence of these two fields, is thus an essential resource for students and practitioners alike.

Interestingly, bioinformatics and genomics are both relatively recent disciplines. Each emerged in the course of the Human Genome Project (HGP) that was conceived in the mid-1980s and began officially on October 1, 1990. As the HGP matured from its initial focus on gene maps in model organisms to the massive efforts to produce a reference human whole genome sequence, there was an increasing need for computational biology tools to store, analyze and disseminate large amounts of sequence data. For this reason, genomics increasingly relied on bioinformatics and, in turn, the field of bioinformatics flourished. Today, no serious student of genomics can imagine life without bioinformatics. This interdependence continues to grow by leaps and bounds as the questions and activities of investigators in genomics become bolder and more expansive; consider, for example, whole genome association studies (GWAS), the ENCODE project, the challenge of ...