Practical Bioinformatics is specifically designed for biology majors with a heavy emphasis on the steps required to perform bioinformatics analysis to answer biological questions. It is written for courses that have a practical hands-on element & contains many exercises (for example database searches protein analysis data interpretation) to complement the straightforward & practical topics. The chapters are focused on DNA RNA & protein sequence analysis-frequently performed subsets of the field of bioinformatics-taking the reader through the commonly asked question what can I learn about this sequence?" A special note to established scientists: new genomic sequences are being published at an accelerating pace. Although new technology has led to unprecedented accuracy of the sequence incomplete & challenging assemblies along with imperfect predictive methods are still generating gene models that require verification. With the sequence analysis skills learned from this book features such as missing exons & incorrect termini can be easily recognized & more accurate gene models can be constructed."