Introduction to Bioinformatics: A Theoretical and Practical Approach was written as an introductory text for the undergraduate, graduate, or professional. This text provides scientists with both a biological framework to understand the questions life scientist confront in the context of the computational issues and tools that are currently available for scientific research It also provides the life scientist with a resource to the various computational tools that are available all supported with their underlying mathematical foundations. The book is divided into four main sections. The first two sections provide an overview of the various biological processes that govern an organism and impact health. The first section, Biochemistry, Cell and Molecular Biology, describes basic cellular structure and the decoding of the genome. The second section, Molecular Genetics covers the regulation of genomes and the molecular genetic basis of disease as a consequence of genetic replication. Clinical human genetics and the various clinical databases are also reviewed. The third section, the Unix Operating System, demystifies the Unix system used throughout the world to support advanced computation tools. In addition to information on the installation and management of Unix-based software tools, examples of command line sequence analyses are presented that will enable the research to become as comfortable in a command-line environment as they are in the Graphical-User Interface environment. The final section, Computer Applications, provides information on the management and analysis of DNA sequencing projects, along with a review of how DNA can be modeled as a statistical series of patterns. It follows with a discussion of the various genome databases, the representation of genomes, and methods for their large scale analyses. Protein visualization, and transcription profiling including the use of analysis software for systems biology round out the coverage. The volume also includes a bonus CD-ROM containing valuable software programs including BioDiscovery (for microarray analysis), ClustalX (a sequence alignment program) Ensembl, MicroAnalyser (for microarray analysis on the Macintosh), Staden Sequence Analysis Package, Tree View (for displaying phylogenies) an others. Also included is a complete set of color illustrations from each chapter that will prove invaluable for professors preparing their next bioinformatics course or seminar.