Richard C. Deonier is Professor Emeritus in the Molecular and Computational Biology Section of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Southern California. Originally trained as a physical biochemist, His major research has been in areas of molecular genetics, with particular interests in physical methods for gene mapping, bacterial transposable elements, and conjugative plasmids. During 30 years of active teaching, he has taught chemistry, biology, and computational biology at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Simon Tavaré holds the George and Louise Kawamoto Chair in Biological Sciences and is a Professor of Biological Sciences, Mathematics, and Preventive Medicine at the University of Southern California. Professor Tavaré's research lies at the interface between statistics and biology, specifically focusing on problems arising in molecular biology, human genetics, population genetics, molecular evolution, and bioinformatics. His statistical interests focus on stochastic computation. Among the applications are linkage disequilibrium mapping, stem cell evolution, and inference in the fossil record. Dr. Tavaré is also a professor in the Department of Oncology at the University of Cambridge, England, where his group concentrates on cancer genomics.
Michael S. Waterman is a University Professor, a USC Associates Chair in Natural Sciences, and Professor of Biological Sciences, Computer Science, and Mathematics at the University of Southern California. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Professor Waterman is Founding Editor and Co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Computational Biology. His research has focused on computational analysis of molecular sequence data. His best-known work is the co-development of the local alignment Smith-Waterman algorithm, which has become the foundational tool for database search methods. His interests have also encompassed physical mapping, as exemplified by the Lander-Waterman formulas, and genome sequence assembly using an Eulerian path method.

This book presents the foundations of key problems in computational molecular biology and bioinformatics. It focuses on computational and statistical principles applied to genomes, and introduces the mathematics and statistics that are crucial for understanding these applications. The book features a free download of the R software statistics package and the text provides great crossover material that is interesting and accessible to students in biology, mathematics, statistics and computer science. More than 100 illustrations and diagrams reinforce concepts and present key results from the primary literature. Exercises are given at the end of chapters. The book is appropriate for a one-semester course for advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate students, and it can also introduce computational biology to computer scientists, mathematicians, or biologists who are extending their interests into this exciting field.

Biology in a Nutshell.- Words.- Word Distributions and Occurrences.- Physical Mapping of DNA.- Genome Rearrangements.- Sequence Alignment.- Rapid Alignment Methods: FASTA and BLAST.- DNA Sequence Assembly.- Signals in DNA.- Similarity, Distance, and Clustering.- Measuring Expression of Genome Information.- Inferring the Past: Phylogenetic Trees.- Genetic Variation in Populations.- Comparative Genomics.