Features of the textbook

This book is organized into three parts. In part I (Chapters 1-7), we introduce the field of bioinformatics. Topics include access to sequence (and other) data, pairwise sequence alignment, BLAST and other methods of searching databases, multiple sequence alignment, and phylogeny. In part II (Chapters 8-14), we discuss functional genomics, moving from DNA (including next-generation sequencing) to RNA (including RNAseq) to protein. Part III (Chapters 15-21) describes the tree of life from a genomics perspective, including chapters on viruses, bacteria and archaea, and the eukaryotes. Practically, I have used this textbook in teaching two courses: an introduction to bioinformatics (Chapters 1-14) and a course on genomics in which we survey the tree of life (Chapters 15-21).