This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Computational Life Sciences, CompLife 2006, held in Cambridge, UK, in September 2006.The 25 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 56 initial submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on genomics, data mining, molecular simulation, molecular informatics, systems biology, biological networks/metabolism, and computational neuroscience.

Computational thinking is increasingly gaining importance in modern biology, due to the unprecedented scale at which data is nowadays produced. Bridging the cultural gap between the biological and computational sciences, this book serves as an accessible introduction to computational concepts for students in the life sciences. It focuses on teaching algorithmic and logical thinking, rather than just the use of existing bioinformatics tools or programming. Topics are presented from a biological point of view, to demonstrate how computational approaches can be used to solve problems in biology such as biological image processing, regulatory networks, and sequence analysis. The book contains a range of pedagogical features to aid understanding, including real-world examples, in-text exercises, end-of-chapter problems, colour-coded Python code, and 'code explained' boxes. User-friendly throughout, Computational Thinking for Life Scientists promotes the thinking skills and self-efficacy required for any modern biologist to adopt computational approaches in their research with confidence.

This book broadly covers the given spectrum of disciplines in Computational Life Sciences, transforming it into a strong helping hand for teachers, students, practitioners and researchers. In Life Sciences, problem-solving and data analysis often depend on biological expertise combined with technical skills in order to generate, manage and efficiently analyse big data. These technical skills can easily be enhanced by good theoretical foundations, developed from well-chosen practical examples and inspiring new strategies. This is the innovative approach of Computational Life Sciences-Data Engineering and Data Mining for Life Sciences: We present basic concepts, advanced topics and emerging technologies, introduce algorithm design and programming principles, address data mining and knowledge discovery as well as applications arising from real projects. Chapters are largely independent and often flanked by illustrative examples and practical advise.

In this book, original papers have been collected to demonstrate the efficient use of computer molecular dynamics simulation methods for the studying of nanoscale phenomena in the materials and life sciences. This book discusses modern molecular simulation methods for the study of molecular shape and properties in protein and polymer engineering, drugs and materials design, structure-function relationships, and related issues. This book contains the Proceedings of the MSSMBS-2014 and DSCMBS-2014 International Workshops which have been organised by the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences and S.U. Umarov Physical-Technical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tajikistan. The research topics discussed in the MSSMBS'14 & DSCMBS'14 International Workshops are as follows: computer molecular simulation methods and approaches; molecular dynamics and Monte-Carlo techniques; modelling of biological molecules; physical and biochemical systems; material fabrication and design; drug design in medicine; computational and computing physics, chemistry, biology and medicine; GPU accelerated molecular dynamics and related techniques.

Computational thinking is increasingly gaining importance in modern biology, due to the unprecedented scale at which data is nowadays produced. Bridging the cultural gap between the biological and computational sciences, this book serves as an accessible introduction to computational concepts for students in the life sciences. It focuses on teaching algorithmic and logical thinking, rather than just the use of existing bioinformatics tools or programming. Topics are presented from a biological point of view, to demonstrate how computational approaches can be used to solve problems in biology such as biological image processing, regulatory networks, and sequence analysis. The book contains a range of pedagogical features to aid understanding, including real-world examples, in-text exercises, end-of-chapter problems, colour-coded Python code, and 'code explained' boxes. User-friendly throughout, Computational Thinking for Life Scientists promotes the thinking skills and self-efficacy required for any modern biologist to adopt computational approaches in their research with confidence.

Bioinformatics is an integrative field of computer science, genetics, genomics, proteomics, and statistics, which has undoubtedly revolutionized the study of biology and medicine in past decades. It mainly assists in modeling, predicting and interpreting large multidimensional biological data by utilizing advanced computational methods. Despite its enormous potential, bioinformatics is not widely integrated into the academic curriculum as most life science students and researchers are still not equipped with the necessary knowledge to take advantage of this powerful tool. Hence, the primary purpose of our book is to supplement this unmet need by providing an easily accessible platform for students and researchers starting their career in life sciences. This book aims to avoid sophisticated computational algorithms and programming. Instead, it focuses on simple DIY analysis and interpretation of biological data with personal computers. Our belief is that once the beginners acquire these basic skillsets, they will be able to handle most of the bioinformatics tools for their research work and to better understand their experimental outcomes. Our second title of this volume set In Silico Life Sciences: Medicine provides hands-on experience in analyzing high throughput molecular data for the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of monogenic or polygenic human diseases. The key concepts in this volume include risk factor assessment, genetic tests and result interpretation, personalized medicine, and drug discovery. This volume is expected to train readers in both single and multi-dimensional biological analysis using open data sets, and provides a unique learning experience through clinical scenarios and case studies.

The future of cancer research and the development of new therapeutic strategies rely on our ability to convert biological and clinical questions into mathematical models—integrating our knowledge of tumour progression mechanisms with the tsunami of information brought by high-throughput technologies such as microarrays and next-generation sequencing. Offering promising insights on how to defeat cancer, the emerging field of systems biology captures the complexity of biological phenomena using mathematical and computational tools. Novel Approaches to Fighting Cancer Drawn from the authors’ decade-long work in the cancer computational systems biology laboratory at Institut Curie (Paris, France), Computational Systems Biology of Cancer explains how to apply computational systems biology approaches to cancer research. The authors provide proven techniques and tools for cancer bioinformatics and systems biology research. Effectively Use Algorithmic Methods and Bioinformatics Tools in Real Biological Applications Suitable for readers in both the computational and life sciences, this self-contained guide assumes very limited background in biology, mathematics, and computer science. It explores how computational systems biology can help fight cancer in three essential aspects: Categorising tumours Finding new targets Designing improved and tailored therapeutic strategies Each chapter introduces a problem, presents applicable concepts and state-of-the-art methods, describes existing tools, illustrates applications using real cases, lists publically available data and software, and includes references to further reading. Some chapters also contain exercises. Figures from the text and scripts/data for reproducing a breast cancer data analysis are available at www.cancer-systems-biology.net.