The ten most wanted solutions in protein bioinformatics

Anna Tramontano

Publisher: Chapman & Hall / CRC Mathematical Biology and Medicine

Protein bioinformatics continues to be a major growth area of biological research, and its position at the interface of molecular biology and the mathematical and computational sciences means that it continually attracts new workers who need to familiarise themselves with the field. It is to such readers that this book is best suited. It succeeds in providing an introduction, which could be read in perhaps a single evening, by someone with little or no knowledge of protein bioinformatics. For such a reader it would provide a fairly comprehensive, but necessarily brief overview of the research challenges the field faces.

A possible criticism of the book is that while it does introduce many important problems, it fails to really set these in their full context. It would not be clear to a new worker which problems represent open questions with little existing literature, and which are already well studied or largely solved. It is equally clear that the amount of page space devoted to each problem does not always reflect its relative importance.

I am not clear about the intended readership. Researchers entering the field could be from mathematical or biological backgrounds. For the former the book could be more mathematical; for instance, the treatment of Karlin-Altchul sequence similarity statistics from the Blast program is relatively poor, and there is a general tendency to avoid the mathematical side. Yet, to this audience an equation can be worth a thousand words. For biologists the introductory material on protein and gene structure is too basic to be of any real use.

Nevertheless, I would recommend this book to a new prospective researcher, so long as he or she understood that it is the start and not the end, and that much more reading will be needed before seriously beginning work.

Reviewed by D.R. Westhead, University of Leeds.

UK Nonlinear News would like to thank Chapman & Hall for providing a copy of this volume for review.