Fundamentals of genes and genomes -- Fundamentals of molecular evolution -- Genomic technologies -- The beginning of bioinformatics -- Data, databases, data format, database search, data retrieval systems, and genome browsers -- Sequence alignment and similarity searching in genomic databases : BLAST and FASTA -- Additional bioinformatic analyses involving nucleic-acid sequences -- Additional bioinformatic analyses involving protein sequences -- Phylogenetic analysis.

Bioinformatics for Beginners provides a coherent and friendly treatment of bioinformatics for any student or scientist within biology who has not routinely performed bioinformatic analysis. The book discusses relevant principles needed to understand the theoretical underpinnings of bioinformatic analysis, and demonstrates with examples targeted analysis using freely available web-based software and publicly available databases. Eschewing non-essential information, the work focuses on principles and hands-on analysis and points to many further study options.