ter of the book is authored by a distinguished team of bioinformatics scientists whom we invited to offer the readers the widest possible range of application domains. To ensure high quality standards, each contributed chapter went through standard peer-reviews and a round of revisions. Contributed chapters have been grouped into four major sections. The first section, entitled Sequence, Structure, and Function, collects contributions on data mining techniques designed to analyze biological sequences and structures with the objective of discovering novel functional knowledge. The second section on Genomics, Transcriptomics, and Proteomics, contains studies addressing emerging large-scale data mining challenges in analyzing high-throughput ‘omics’ data. The chapters in the third section, entitled Functional and Molecular Interaction Networks, address emerging system-scale molecular properties and their relevance to cellular functions. The fourth section is about Literature, Ontology, and Knowledge Integrations, and it collects chapters related to knowledge representation, information retrieval, and data integration for structured and unstructured biological data. The contributed works in the fifth and last section, entitled Genome Medicine Applications, address emerging biological data mining applications in medicine.
We believe this book can serve as a valuable guide to the field for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners. We hope that the wide range of topics covered will allow readers to appreciate the extent of the impact of data mining in molecular biology and genetics. For us, research in data mining and its applications to biology and genetics is fascinating and rewarding. It may even help save human lives one day. This field offers great opportunities and rewards if one is prepared to learn molecular biology and genetics, design user-friendly software tools under the proper biological assumptions, and validate all discovered hypothesis rigorously using appropriate models.
In closing, we would like to thank all the authors that contributed a chapter in the book. We are also indebted to Randi Cohen, our outstanding publishing editor. Randi efficiently managed timelines and deadlines, gracefully handled the communication with the authors and the reviewers, and took care of every little detail associated with this project. This book could not have been possible without her.
Our thanks also go to our families for their support throughout the book project.
Jake Y. Chen and Stefano Lonardi
You can purchase the book at Amazon.com here.
"Biological Database Modeling" (2007) Ed. by Jake Y Chen and Amandeep Sidhu, Artech House.