Computing for Comparative Microbial Genomics

• Introductions.- Sequences as Biological Information: Cells Obey the Laws of Chemistry and Physics.- Bioinformatics for Microbiologists: An Introduction.- Microbial Genome Sequences: A New Era in Microbiology.- An Overview of Genome Databases.- The Challenges of Programming: A Brief Introduction.- Comparative Genomics.- Methods to Compare Genomes The First Examples.- Genomic Properties: Length, Base Composition and DNA Structures.- Word Frequencies and Repeats.- Transcriptomics and Proteomics.- Transcriptomics: Translated and Untranslated RNA.- Expression of Genes and Proteins.- Of Proteins, Genomes, and Proteomes.- Microbial Communities.- Microbial Communities: Core and Pan-Genomics.- Metagenomics of Microbial Communities.- Evolution of Microbial Communities; or, On the Origins of Bacterial Species.

From the reviews: "It is a very well-written review of genomics and proteomics of microbes, and makes convincing arguments for the practicality of applying bioinformatics to the study of communities of these species. The references are well chosen. The writing style is superb. ... There is an amazing amount of interesting material, in fewer than 275 pages. ... The book is probably more suitable as an introduction to contemporary applications of bioinformatics and microbiology for computational scientists." (Anthony J. Duben, ACM Computing Reviews, June, 2009)