Jin Xiong is Assistant Professor of Biology at Texas A & M University, where he has taught bioinformatics to graduate and undergraduate students for several years.

Preface; Part I. Introduction and Biological Databases: 1. Introduction; 2. Introduction to biological databases; Part II. Sequence Alignment: 3. Pairwise sequence alignment; 4. Database similarity search; 5. Multiple sequence alignment; 6. Profiles and hidden Markov models; 7. Protein motifs and patterns; Part III. Gene and Promoter Prediction: 8. Gene prediction; 9. Promoter and regulatory element prediction; Part IV. Molecular Phylogenetics: 10. Phylogenetics basics; 11. Phylogenetic tree construction methods and programs; Part V. Protein Structure Basics: 12. Protein structure basics; 13. Protein structure visualization, comparison and classification; 14. Protein secondary structure prediction; 15. Protein tertiary structure prediction; 16. RNA structure prediction; Part VI. Genomics and Proteomics: 17. Genome mapping, assembly and comparison; 18. Functional genomics; 19. Proteomics; Practical exercises; Glossary.