Only little more than a decade ago the term "genetic engineering" was hardly known outside research laboratories. Today it regularly makes headlines in the news. Supporters and opponents as well tell us that it could change our lives more than any other technological advance. This book delivers the state-of-the-art facts in order to empower the public to make knowledge-based decisions about plant biotechnology and GM crops and GM food, in particular. It discusses the hot topics of the present debate in a neutral manner and will function as a personal reference book for the interested public, for decision maker, and managers of consumer organisations.
This book presents practical approaches for the analysis of data from gene expression micro-arrays. It describes the conceptual and methodological underpinning for a statistical tool and its implementation in software. The book includes coverage of various packages that are part of the Bioconductor project and several related R tools. The materials presented cover a range of software tools designed for varied audiences.
Modern DNA microarray technologies have evolved over the past 25 years to the point where it is now possible to take many million measurements from a single experiment. These two volumes, Parts A & B in the Methods in Enzymology series provide methods that will shepard any molecular biologist through the process of planning, performing, and publishing microarray results. Part A starts with an overview of a number of microarray platforms, both commercial and academically produced and includes wet bench protocols for performing traditional expression analysis and derivative techniques such as detection of transcription factor occupancy and chromatin status. Wet-bench protocols and troubleshooting techniques continue into Part B. These techniques are well rooted in traditional molecular biology and while they require traditional care, a researcher that can reproducibly generate beautiful Northern or Southern blots should have no difficulty generating beautiful array hybridizations. Data management is a more recent problem for most biologists. The bulk of Part B provides a range of techniques for data handling. This includes critical issues, from normalization within and between arrays, to uploading your results to the public repositories for array data, and how to integrate data from multiple sources. There are chapters in Part B for both the debutant and the expert bioinformatician. - Provides an overview of platforms - Includes experimental design and wet bench protocols - Presents statistical and data analysis methods, array databases, data visualization and meta analysis
2018 James Beard Foundation Book of the Year | 2018 James Beard Foundation Book Award Winner inWriting | Nominee for the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction | #75 on The Root100 2018 A renowned culinary historian offers a fresh perspective on our most divisive cultural issue, race, in this illuminating memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces his ancestry—both black and white—through food, from Africa to America and slavery to freedom. Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who "owns" it is one of the most provocative touch points in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, culinary historian Michael W. Twitty takes readers to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine. From the tobacco and rice farms of colonial times to plantation kitchens and backbreaking cotton fields, Twitty tells his family story through the foods that enabled his ancestors’ survival across three centuries. He sifts through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents, and travels from Civil War battlefields in Virginia to synagogues in Alabama to Black-owned organic farms in Georgia. As he takes us through his ancestral culinary history, Twitty suggests that healing may come from embracing the discomfort of the Southern past. Along the way, he reveals a truth that is more than skin deep—the power that food has to bring the kin of the enslaved and their former slaveholders to the table, where they can discover the real America together. Illustrations by Stephen Crotts
The recent explosive growth of biological data has lead to a rapid increase in the number of molecular biology databases. Held in many different locations and often using varying interfaces and non-standard data formats, integrating and comparing data from these multiple databases can be difficult and time-consuming. This book provides an overview of the key tools currently available for large-scale comparisons of gene sequences and annotations, focusing on the databases and tools from the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), Ensembl, and the National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Written specifically for biology and bioinformatics students and researchers, it aims to give an appreciation of the methods by which the browsers and their databases are constructed, enabling readers to determine which tool is the most appropriate for their requirements. Each chapter contains a summary and exercises to aid understanding and promote effective use of these important tools.
Praise for the third edition of Bioinformatics "This book is a gem to read and use in practice." —Briefings in Bioinformatics "This volume has a distinctive, special value as it offers an unrivalled level of details and unique expert insights from the leading computational biologists, including the very creators of popular bioinformatics tools." —ChemBioChem "A valuable survey of this fascinating field. . . I found it to be the most useful book on bioinformatics that I have seen and recommend it very highly." —American Society for Microbiology News "This should be on the bookshelf of every molecular biologist." —The Quarterly Review of Biolog" The field of bioinformatics is advancing at a remarkable rate. With the development of new analytical techniques that make use of the latest advances in machine learning and data science, today’s biologists are gaining fantastic new insights into the natural world’s most complex systems. These rapidly progressing innovations can, however, be difficult to keep pace with. The expanded fourth edition of the best-selling Bioinformatics aims to remedy this by providing students and professionals alike with a comprehensive survey of the current field. Revised to reflect recent advances in computational biology, it offers practical instruction on the gathering, analysis, and interpretation of data, as well as explanations of the most powerful algorithms presently used for biological discovery. Bioinformatics, Fourth Edition offers the most readable, up-to-date, and thorough introduction to the field for biologists at all levels, covering both key concepts that have stood the test of time and the new and important developments driving this fast-moving discipline forwards. This new edition features: New chapters on metabolomics, population genetics, metagenomics and microbial community analysis, and translational bioinformatics A thorough treatment of statistical methods as applied to biological data Special topic boxes and appendices highlighting experimental strategies and advanced concepts Annotated reference lists, comprehensive lists of relevant web resources, and an extensive glossary of commonly used terms in bioinformatics, genomics, and proteomics Bioinformatics is an indispensable companion for researchers, instructors, and students of all levels in molecular biology and computational biology, as well as investigators involved in genomics, clinical research, proteomics, and related fields.
The #1 NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller The basis for the PBS Ken Burns Documentary The Gene: An Intimate History Now includes an excerpt from Siddhartha Mukherjee’s new book Song of the Cell! From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies—a fascinating history of the gene and “a magisterial account of how human minds have laboriously, ingeniously picked apart what makes us tick” (Elle). “Sid Mukherjee has the uncanny ability to bring together science, history, and the future in a way that is understandable and riveting, guiding us through both time and the mystery of life itself.” —Ken Burns “Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee dazzled readers with his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies in 2010. That achievement was evidently just a warm-up for his virtuoso performance in The Gene: An Intimate History, in which he braids science, history, and memoir into an epic with all the range and biblical thunder of Paradise Lost” (The New York Times). In this biography Mukherjee brings to life the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices. “Mukherjee expresses abstract intellectual ideas through emotional stories…[and] swaddles his medical rigor with rhapsodic tenderness, surprising vulnerability, and occasional flashes of pure poetry” (The Washington Post). Throughout, the story of Mukherjee’s own family—with its tragic and bewildering history of mental illness—reminds us of the questions that hang over our ability to translate the science of genetics from the laboratory to the real world. In riveting and dramatic prose, he describes the centuries of research and experimentation—from Aristotle and Pythagoras to Mendel and Darwin, from Boveri and Morgan to Crick, Watson and Franklin, all the way through the revolutionary twenty-first century innovators who mapped the human genome. “A fascinating and often sobering history of how humans came to understand the roles of genes in making us who we are—and what our manipulation of those genes might mean for our future” (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel), The Gene is the revelatory and magisterial history of a scientific idea coming to life, the most crucial science of our time, intimately explained by a master. “The Gene is a book we all should read” (USA TODAY).
Different cancer types can result from a multiplicity of genetic and environmental factors. In recent years a number of genes have been identified as strong determinants for particular forms of cancer (particularly colon and breast cancer). The incomplete penetrance often evinced by the mutations of these genes has raised the possibility that additional endogenous or exogenous determinants contribute to cancer development or suppression. The major aim of this book is to present an integrated view of the various environmental, epidemiological and genetic determinants that contribute to a disease syndrome collectively known as "cancer".
"Cotton, 2nd edition, edited by David D. Fang and Richard G. Percy, is a long awaited, much needed comprehensive update on the science of cotton. This book epitomizes the thorough coverage of an Agronomy Monograph. Readers will find essential coverage of the many scientific advancements in the field, from fiber handling to the transgenic cotton revolution. This amazing and versatile crop, cultivated for more than 7000 years, is one of the most powerful stories in agricultural science. More than 50 experts who contributed to this volume represent the leading edge of this exciting story."
INTRODUCTION (Paul H. Dear) 1. Database resources for wet-bench scientists (Neil Hall and Lynn Schriml) 2. Navigating sequenced genomes (Melody Clark and Thomas Schlitt) 3. Sequence similarity searches (Jaap Heringa and Walter Pirovano) 4. Gene prediction (Marie-Adele Rajandream) 5. Prediction of non coding transcripts (Alex Bateman and Sam Griffiths-Jones) 6. Finding regulatory elements in DNA sequence (Debraj GuhaThakurta and Gary Stormo) 7. Expressed sequence tags (Arthur Gruber) 8. Protein structure, classification and prediction (Arthur Lesk) 9. Gene ontology (Vineet Sangar) 10. Prediction of protein function (Rodrigo Lopez) 11. Multiple sequence alignment (Burkhard Morgenstern) 12. Inferring phylogenetic relationships from sequence data (Peter Foster) Appendix Index
