Bioinformatics: A Practical Guide to NCBI Databases and Sequence Alignments provides the basics of bioinformatics and in-depth coverage of NCBI databases, sequence alignment, and NCBI Sequence Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST).

Hamid D. Ismail earned his Ph.D. and M.Sc. in computational science from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, USA, and Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM) and Applied Diploma in Statistics and Programming from the University of Khartoum, Sudan. He has worked as an adjunct professor, bioinformatics specialist, bioinformatics tool developer, senior scientist, statistician, and database consultant with several institutions. He is currently a Ph.D. Research Associate at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. Dr. Ismail is a published author in bioinformatics, statistics, machine learning, and bio-science, and hehas developed a number of bioinformatics desktop and web-based applications. He is also a reviewer for a number of academic journals.

Contents

Preface, vii

Acknowledgments, ix

Chapter 1 | The Origin of Genomic Information 1

Chapter 2 | The Sources of Genomic Data 39

Chapter 3 | The NCBI Entrez Databases 77

Chapter 4 | NCBI Entrez E- Utilities and Applications 265

Chapter 5 | The Entrez Direct 289

Chapter 6 | R and Python Packages for the NCBI E- Utilities 343

Chapter 7 | Pairwise Sequence Alignment 383

Chapter 8 | Basic Local Alignment Search Tool 407

INDEX, 453