Introduces biological concepts and biotechnologies producing the data, graph and network theory, cluster analysis and machine learning, using real-world biological and medical examples.

This new title in the well-established "Quantitative Network Biology" series includes innovative and existing methods for analyzing network data in such areas as network biology and chemoinformatics. With its easy-to-follow introduction to the theoretical background and application-oriented chapters, the book demonstrates that R is a powerful language for statistically analyzing networks and for solving such large-scale phenomena as network sampling and bootstrapping. Written by editors and authors with an excellent track record in the field, this is the ultimate reference for R in Network Analysis.

Big data, genomics, and quantitative approaches to network-based analysis are combining to advance the frontiers of medicine as never before. Network Medicine introduces this rapidly evolving field of medical research, which promises to revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of human diseases. With contributions from leading experts that highlight the necessity of a team-based approach in network medicine, this definitive volume provides readers with a state-of-the-art synthesis of the progress being made and the challenges that remain. Medical researchers have long sought to identify single molecular defects that cause diseases, with the goal of developing silver-bullet therapies to treat them. But this paradigm overlooks the inherent complexity of human diseases and has often led to treatments that are inadequate or fraught with adverse side effects. Rather than trying to force disease pathogenesis into a reductionist model, network medicine embraces the complexity of multiple influences on disease and relies on many different types of networks: from the cellular-molecular level of protein-protein interactions to correlational studies of gene expression in biological samples. The authors offer a systematic approach to understanding complex diseases while explaining network medicine’s unique features, including the application of modern genomics technologies, biostatistics and bioinformatics, and dynamic systems analysis of complex molecular networks in an integrative context. By developing techniques and technologies that comprehensively assess genetic variation, cellular metabolism, and protein function, network medicine is opening up new vistas for uncovering causes and identifying cures of disease.

Bioinformatics, a field devoted to the interpretation and analysis of biological data using computational techniques, has evolved tremendously in recent years due to the explosive growth of biological information generated by the scientific community. Soft computing is a consortium of methodologies that work synergistically and provides, in one form or another, flexible information processing capabilities for handling real-life ambiguous situations. Several research articles dealing with the application of soft computing tools to bioinformatics have been published in the recent past; however, they are scattered in different journals, conference proceedings and technical reports, thus causing inconvenience to readers, students and researchers. This book, unique in its nature, is aimed at providing a treatise in a unified framework, with both theoretical and experimental results, describing the basic principles of soft computing and demonstrating the various ways in which they can be used for analyzing biological data in an efficient manner. Interesting research articles from eminent scientists around the world are brought together in a systematic way such that the reader will be able to understand the issues and challenges in this domain, the existing ways of tackling them, recent trends, and future directions. This book is the first of its kind to bring together two important research areas, soft computing and bioinformatics, in order to demonstrate how the tools and techniques in the former can be used for efficiently solving several problems in the latter. Sample Chapter(s). Chapter 1: Bioinformatics: Mining the Massive Data from High Throughput Genomics Experiments (160 KB). Contents: Overview: Bioinformatics: Mining the Massive Data from High Throughput Genomics Experiments (H Tang & S Kim); An Introduction to Soft Computing (A Konar & S Das); Biological Sequence and Structure Analysis: Reconstructing Phylogenies with Memetic Algorithms and Branch-and-Bound (J E Gallardo et al.); Classification of RNA Sequences with Support Vector Machines (J T L Wang & X Wu); Beyond String Algorithms: Protein Sequence Analysis Using Wavelet Transforms (A Krishnan & K-B Li); Filtering Protein Surface Motifs Using Negative Instances of Active Sites Candidates (N L Shrestha & T Ohkawa); Distill: A Machine Learning Approach to Ab Initio Protein Structure Prediction (G Pollastri et al.); In Silico Design of Ligands Using Properties of Target Active Sites (S Bandyopadhyay et al.); Gene Expression and Microarray Data Analysis: Inferring Regulations in a Genomic Network from Gene Expression Profiles (N Noman & H Iba); A Reliable Classification of Gene Clusters for Cancer Samples Using a Hybrid Multi-Objective Evolutionary Procedure (K Deb et al.); Feature Selection for Cancer Classification Using Ant Colony Optimization and Support Vector Machines (A Gupta et al.); Sophisticated Methods for Cancer Classification Using Microarray Data (S-B Cho & H-S Park); Multiobjective Evolutionary Approach to Fuzzy Clustering of Microarray Data (A Mukhopadhyay et al.). Readership: Graduate students and researchers in computer science, bioinformatics, computational and molecular biology, artificial intelligence, data mining, machine learning, electrical engineering, system science; researchers in pharmaceutical industries.

The rapidly developing field of systems biology is influencing many aspects of biological research and is expected to transform biomedicine. Some emerging offshoots and specialized branches in systems biology are receiving particular attention and are becoming highly active areas of research. This collection of invited reviews describes some of the latest cutting-edge experimental and computational advances in these emerging sub-fields of systems biology. In particular, this collection focuses on the study of mammalian embryonic stem cells; new technologies involving mass-spectrometry proteomics; single cell measurements; methods for modeling complex stochastic systems; network-based classification algorithms; and the revolutionary emerging field of systems pharmacology.

This volume comprises a selection of papers presented at ANNIMAB-1, the first conference to focus specifically on the topics of ANNs in medicine and biology. It covers three main areas: The medical applications of ANNs, such as in diagnosis and outcome prediction, medical image analysis, and medical signal processing; The uses of ANNs in biology outside clinical medicine, such as in data analysis, in molecular biology, and in simulations of biological systems; The theoretical aspects of ANNs, examining recent developments in learning algorithms and the possible role of ANNs in the medical decision process. Summarising the state-of-the-art and analysing the relationship between ANN techniques and other available methods, it also points to possible future biological and medical uses of ANNs. Essential reading for all neural network theorists, it will also be of interest to biologists and physicians with an interest in modelling and advanced statistical techniques.

Motivated by the explosion of molecular data on humans-particularly data associated with individual patients-and the sense that there are large, as-yet-untapped opportunities to use this data to improve health outcomes, Toward Precision Medicine explores the feasibility and need for "a new taxonomy of human disease based on molecular biology" and develops a potential framework for creating one. The book says that a new data network that integrates emerging research on the molecular makeup of diseases with clinical data on individual patients could drive the development of a more accurate classification of diseases and ultimately enhance diagnosis and treatment. The "new taxonomy" that emerges would define diseases by their underlying molecular causes and other factors in addition to their traditional physical signs and symptoms. The book adds that the new data network could also improve biomedical research by enabling scientists to access patients' information during treatment while still protecting their rights. This would allow the marriage of molecular research and clinical data at the point of care, as opposed to research information continuing to reside primarily in academia. Toward Precision Medicine notes that moving toward individualized medicine requires that researchers and health care providers have access to very large sets of health- and disease-related data linked to individual patients. These data are also critical for developing the information commons, the knowledge network of disease, and ultimately the new taxonomy.