Discovering Genomics, Proteomics and Bioinformatics (2nd Edition)

This book is for students who have considerable knowledge of Biology that has included basic Genetics and Genomics. For those of us who studied Human Genetics in the 1960's it is a challenge to read and understand. If one is willing to study and learn completely new information including many new words and terms this book will enlighten one as to where we are in Genomics today and give insight into the future of Medicine. In the forty-five years that I have been a Family Physician there is nothing that has changed the practice of Medicine like this new field of Genomics and Proteomics most likely will. My suggestion to any physician who plans to practice more than five years is to buy this book and find a Professor like Dr. Campbell to guide you to understand this new and exciting subject.

This was a great textbook. The website was very helpful and I liked how the author did not waste paper/printing/money on images and half of the information was on the web. It was nice not carrying around a heavy text all semester, even if half my reading/work was done in front of a computer. A lot of information packed into this book. One sentence sometimes requires a lot of knowledge (thank goodness for my professor who explained it all). I would have to say, without a lecture, I would walk away from this text thinking I knew something but not knowing much at all. For an amature like me, I definitely need a lecture to go along with this text. Although some mistakes were found, a lot less than the first edition (so I'm told).

This book represents a breakthrough in textbook design. It starts with a 'case study' for a child visiting you the physician. You get the basic symptoms from the mother, then you are sent to the web to go attempt to establish a diagnosis. And you are not sent to some private web site, but to the Online Mendelian Inheitance in Man (OMIN) database of human diseases and genes, and to the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Immediately the student is exposed to a wealth of information far beyond what any book could provide. It's rare that you see a textbook that attempts to take the student into the real world. Intermixed with the case studies is textual materials that provide the student with the basic background that they need. In addition there are almost random Math Minutes and Discovery Questions that direct the student into further depth of understanding. If you are planning to teach this kind of class, you owe it to yourself to at least investigate this book before selecting a text.

The sheer number of books in the area of bioinformatics is growing rapidly, and each author takes a different approach to the topic: Bergeron's Bioinformatics Computing uses concepts from Information Theory, while Pervzner's Computational Molecular Biology uses Graph Theory and Durbin et. al. Biological Sequence Analysis use Statistics and hard core mathematical analysis to get the point across. Campbell and Heyer, the authors of Discovering Genomics, Proteomics, & Bioinformatics use concepts from Electrical Engineering and Control Engineering to prescribe some of the details of genomics and proteomics. As an instructor you need to choose the right book to meet the needs and understanding level of your target audience. For biology students that have little mathematics or statistics knowledge but have taken Physics II (E & M), this would be the perfect book. The authors are a little heaving on the biological terminologies, so a sophomore level Computer Science major with little or no biology background would have a difficult time coming up to speed at the beginning, but the glossary of terms at the end of the book is comprehensive enough that can aid the learning process. The approach to figuring out what, where and how genes are controlled using what are called circuits is simply fascinating. Genes are controlled in three ways: location of the gene, the time of control and the amount. These three metrics can easily be mapped to circuit diagram in Electrical Engineering using the concept of switches (transistors) and time varying influencers (control theory and feedback loops), the authors describe of genes are regulated. One can imagine that the process of mapping genes into circuits is a difficult task, and one would be right. In fact, only one gene, the Endo16, has been fully expressed in circuit diagrams and that task took years of research. Imagine the amount of man power and hours it would take to draw the circuit diagram for the entire human genome of over 35000 genes! Even the concepts of noise in the circuit and complex integrated circuits are explored in details. The authors make no hesitation in telling the readers what the unknowns are and what topics are under intense investigation. It is amazing to realize that we still a long way to go, and what we are seeing thus far is just the beginning on a very long journey. In general, the book is very interactive filled with Discovery Questions, Math Minutes and a CD simply filled with tons and tons of pictures that are in PDF format that can be printed in need be. There is also a Web site that accompanies this book that explains various bioinformatics methods, and contains information required by some of the Discovery Questions. The text itself is divided into four units: 1) Genomic Sequences which talks about the whole picture of genomic analysis and its benefits. The question of why this field of study is so important and what we hope to gain from in the coming years

Abstract: great and innovative book. I have seen many books, but none like this. It is still concise in this first edition, yet could become the "Lewin" of genomics.Score: 9/10.Recommended to students: yes, together with classic works like Brown.Recommended to Central Library: yes.1. The supplied CD-ROM is a nice teaching aid. Yet, it is difficult to "extract" pictures from it for teaching purposes. It would be much more useful if the pictures were individually supplied in standard high-quality graphic formats like TIFF, instead of PDF. The later is perfect for distributing text with pictures, but not to retrieve such pictures. Other publishers distribute the book artwork as individual TIFF files. That approach greatly enhances the book and boost sales. This is particularly useful for teachers. Actually, it is a must for us these days. Please, make sure that future versions of the CD-ROM or DVD-ROM are --as this one-- compatible with the open-source Unix-based Mac OS X platform. Thanks.2. The associated web page "Instructor's Guide"3. The discovering questions are terrific. Please, expand them in future versions.4. Math minutes are an excellent idea.5. Boxes are welcome. Please, include more.6. Also helpful are the boldface words on each chapter. Perhaps they could be also included in a keywords at the beginning of each chapter.7. The index should be more comprehensive and should have all main entries in boldface. This is important to any index and very few books have it right.8. The glossary is helpful. It should be more comprehensive,including more terms.9. The summaries and conclusions are great, yet should be expanded to include more relevant information. They should be like a "minichapter" an the end of each chapter or --better-- at the beginning. All partial summaries could be pooled into a larger summary that way.10. Addendum sections could be included as separate notes or boxes.11. The pronunciation tips for new words are also an excellent idea; mostly for non-English speakers.12. The classified references are really useful. Well done. If they were commented or "annotated" they would be just perfect.13. A list of abbreviations would be welcome. A list sorted by the full name would be very handy as well.14. What about telomerase and aging? What about the fact thatunicellular organisms are immortal? Or stem cells? Or tumor cells? Death is a tax that multicellular organisms have to pay to nature in order to evolve. Yet we humans might change that soon.15. It should be clearly indicated the organisms with genomes made of dsDNA, ssDNA, dsRNA and ssRNA.16. Missing bioinformatics tools and step-by-step analysis of genes and mRNA (see next) and whole genomes.17. It would be really helpful to explain clearly and analyze --even from a bioinformatics point of view-- the structure of genes, mRNA, CDS, introns, exons, promoters and terminators. It is not clear where do these elements start or end or how to recognize them. Diagrams and graphs would gre