FOREWORD
The quality of the coverage and the timeliness of the first edition of Structural Bioinformatics led to its wide usage. In turn, the collection has been adopted by the community as a defining articulation for the utility of bioinformatics and structural biology applied to address a range of functional studies in 21st Century Biology. I personally found the book to be read by students, postdoctoral fellows and more senior researchers around the world. The success reflected the excitement in the growing impact of both domains and also helped to accelerate that impact. As pointed out in the Introduction, bioinformatics is now a mainstream activity within the biological sciences; similarly, the implementation of the structural genomics initiative worldwide as a logical and necessary follow up to the Human Genome Project represents the consensus that structure is indeed important for understanding the mechanisms of molecular function. The increased impact and rapid progress during the 6 years, since the first edition was published, demonstrate the extraordinary significance of the interface between structural biology and informatics. Such significant advances indicate the clear need for an update, which has now been provided through the editorial efforts of Gu and Bourne and the writing team of leading researchers who bring the reader to the edge of the frontier.
The second edition, simultaneously as a textbook and an expert monograph, contains a balanced set of contributions, ...
