Genomics and Proteomics: Functional and Computational Aspects

Genome research will certainly be one of the most important and exciting sci- tific disciplines of the 21st century. Deciphering the structure of the human genome, as well as that of several model organisms, is the key to our understanding how genes fu- tion in health and disease. With the combined development of innovativetools, resources, scientific know-how, and an overall functional genomic strategy, the origins of human and other organisms’geneticdiseases can be traced. Scientificresearch groups and dev- opmental departments of several major pharmaceutical and biotechnological companies are using new, innovative strategies to unravel how genes function, elucidating the gene protein product, understanding how genes interact with others-both in health and in the disease state. Presently, the impact of the applications of genome research on our society in medicine, agriculture and nutrition will be comparable only to that of communication technologies. In fact, computational methods, including networking, have been playing a substantial role even in genomics and proteomics from the beginning. We can observe, however, a fundamental change of the paradigm in life sciences these days: research focused until now mostly on the study of single processes related to a few genes or gene products, but due to technical developments of the last years we can now potentially identify and analyze all genes and gene products of an organism and clarify their role in the network of lifeprocesses.

Table of Contents:
...and counting: DNA-Microarrays; J. D. Hoheisel. Obtaining and evaluating gene expression profiles with cDNA microarrays; M. Bittner, et al. Large scale expression screening identifies molecular pathways and predicts gene function; N. Pollet, et al. The Glean Machine: What can we learn from DNA sequence polymorphisms? D. L. Hartl, et al. Automatic assembly and editing of genomic data; B. Chevreux, et al. QUEST: an iterated sequence databank search method; W. R. Taylor, N. P. Brown. An essay on individual sequence variation in expressed sequence tags (ESTs); J. Reich, J. Hanke. Sequence similarity based gene prediction; R. Guigó, et al. Functional proteomics; J. Klose. The genome as a flexible polymer chain: recent results from simulations and experiments; J. Langowski, et al. Analysis of chromosome territory architecture in the human cell nucleus: overview of data from a collaborative study; H. Bornfleth, et al. From sequence to structure and function: Modelling and simulation of light-activated membrane proteins; J. Baudry, et al. SHOX homeobox gene and Turner syndrome; E. Rao, G. A. Rappold. A feature-based approach to discrimination and prediction of protein folding groups; B. Mirkin, O. Ritter. Linking structural biology with genome research: The Berlin `Protein Structure Factory' initiative; U. Heinemann, et al. G protein-coupled receptors, or the power of data; F. Horn, et al. Distributed application management in bioinformatics; M. Senger, et al. Is human genetics becoming dangerous to society? C. J. Epstein: Index.