ISCB Newsletter v.6.3

Note: If you are an ISCB member with a new book and would like to see it in these pages, please email admin@iscb.org. In addition, reviews of books in computational biology and reading lists can be found in the publications section of the ISCB website.

This year, former ISCB President and current Board Member Philip Bourne of the University of California, San Diego, along with Helge Weissig of ActiveX in San Diego, edited Structural Bioinformatics, the first textbook to be published in that field. The book is a collection of contributions from leading authorities. Written for molecular biologists, biochemists, biophysicists, and bioinformaticians in basic and clinical research, as well as undergraduate and graduate students in biology, medicine, and computer science, the book offers detailed coverage for practitioners while remaining accessible to the novice.

“This collection . . . is a must-read for all of us committed to understanding the interplay of structure and function . . . [T]he individual chapters outline the suite of major basic life science questions such as the status of efforts to predict protein structure and how proteins carry out cellular functions, and also the applied life science questions such as how structural bioinformatics can improve health care through accelerating drug discovery.”

From the Foreword by John Wooley, associate vice chancellor for research at the University of California, San Diego.

As genomic and post-genomic innovations revolutionize the biological sciences, three-dimensional structural data continues to prove of vital importance to understanding function. Structural Bioinformatics represents an unprecedented, comprehensive account of the state of the discipline, providing an essential resource for students and practitioners.

Bourne and Weissig’s authoritative text delivers a basic understanding of the theories, associated algorithms, resources, and tools used in structural bioinformatics, according to the publisher. Among other topics, the book covers: Fundamentals of protein structure X-ray crystallography Molecular visualization Structure classification of proteins (SCOP) Class, architecture, topology, and homology (CATH) classification Proteins as drug targets. Practicing researchers as well as students in biology, medicine, and computer science will find Structural Bioinformatics to be this field’s premier resource.

Bourne, Philip E. and Weissig, Helge, eds. Structural Bioinformatics. New Jersey: Wiley-Liss, 2003.

A second book that covers a wide range of issues in computational biology, Computational Biology and Genome Informatics, was edited by 2003 ISCB Board Member Cathy Wu of Georgetown University Medical Center and the Bioinformatics National Biomedical Research Foundation; Jason Wang of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and Paul P Wang of Duke University.

According to the publisher, the book contains articles written by experts on a wide range of topics that are associated with the analysis and management of biological information at the molecular level. It contains chapters on RNA and protein structure analysis, DNA computing, sequence mapping, genome comparison, gene expression data mining, metabolic network modeling, and phyloinformatics.

The important work of some representative researchers in bioinformatics is brought together for the first time in one volume. The topic is treated in depth and is related to, where applicable, other emerging technologies such as data mining and visualization. The goal of the book is to introduce readers to the principle techniques of bioinformatics in the hope that they will build on them to make new discoveries of their own.

Wang, Jason T.L., Wu, Cathy H., Wang, Paul P., eds. Computational Biology and Genome Informatics. New Jersey: World Scientific Pub. Co, 2003.