The following link list is intended to help you get started in bioinformatics, if you are new to the subject, especially if you have little or no background in biological sciences.

Basic science links


Bioinformatics is a study of complex biological data by computer methods. To understand what is biological data and why it is studied in the first place, one needs some idea of general biology, in particular biochemistry and molecular biology. The following links provide some starting points if you feel you need to refresh your background knowledge.

  Basic genetics and DNA, with excellent animations:
DNA from the beginning
http://www.dnaftb.org/dnaftb/

Beginner's Guide to Molecular Biology (including cell biology and protein structure)
http://www.rothamsted.bbsrc.ac.uk/notebook/

Molecular biology for computer scientists, a 46-page pdf to give a biological introduction in the field of computational biology.
http://compbio.ucdenver.edu/hunter/01-Hunter.pdf

An introduction to biochemistry at U of Arizona, USA
http://www.biology.arizona.edu/biochemistry/biochemistry.html

An introduction to cell biology at U of Arizona, USA
http://www.biology.arizona.edu/cell_bio/cell_bio.html

General biology
http://www.biology-resources.com/


A quick view inside bioinformatics


The following sites give easy introductions into some special topics that are hot spots in bioinformatics research

  The article on Bioinformatics in Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioinformatics lists major applications concisely.

An article by
Luscombe, Greenbaum and Gerstein from 2001 is still a better read, despite some missing new information.

Genomics and Its Impact on Science and Society.
Reasons for doing genome research.
http://www.ornl.gov/hgmis/publicat/primer2001/

Online Education Kit: Understanding the Human Genome Project
Study at least How to sequence a genome and Bioinformatics
http://www.genome.gov/25019879

Why are protein structures important and interesting?
http://publications.nigms.nih.gov/structlife/structlife.pdf

How is drug design related to bioinformatics?
Read the Wikipedia article on drug design, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_design, and if your interest is still up, another one on Quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_structure-activity_relationship, and on toxicity, metabolic properties etc., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADME, which is one of the goals of QSAR predictions.

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