Bio eye for the CS guy (or gal!)

Lately, as a result of my fascination with Synthetic Biology, I have been reading biology and bioinformatics references voraciously. More on Synthetic Biology to come, but I encourage you to read up on it. It suffices to say that it greatly appeals to me, coming from a Computer Science and engineering background. When you throw “refactoring” and “bacteriophage” into the same paper title, or mention languages and grammars for programming DNA, you’ve got my attention.

<p>To my surprise, I have found several resources that introduce biological concepts to readers with just such a background.  In the interest of sharing this information over primping and editing this in Mephisto admin, here&#8217;s a work-in-progress of said list.</p>


<p><img src="http://jayunit.net/assets/2008/1/16/biocspastie.png" alt="Some Ruby code that is maybe imaginary" title="Oh noetry it's an image of code because I'm too lazy to install a code highlighting plugin right now, my standards-hip web accessibility friends are gonna lynch me!" /></p>


<p>I have partially or fully read, and recommend:</p>


<ul>
<li>Cohen, Jacques. <a href="http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/predrag/files/cohen_2004.pdf">Bioinformatics: An Introduction for Computer Scientists</a> . (PDF)</li>
    <li>Cohen, Jacques. <a href="http://helix-web.stanford.edu/bmi214/articles/p72-cohen.pdf">Computer Science and Bioinformatics</a>. (PDF)</li>
    <li>Cohen, William.  <a href="http://www.springer.com/west/home/generic/search/results?SGWID=4-40109-22-173702304-0">A Computer Scientist&#8217;s Guide to Cell Biology</a>. (book, publisher&#8217;s site)</li>
    <li>Hunter, Lawrence (editor). <a href="http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/classic/hunter.html">Artificial Intelligence and Molecular Biology.</a>. (full text in <span class="caps">HTML</span>)</li>
</ul>


<p>For the last entry, especially note chapters 1, &#8220;Molecular Biology for Computer Scientists,&#8221; and 2, &#8220;The Computational Linguistics of Biological Sequences .&#8221;</p>


<p>This last one is not related to programming, but is an amazing introduction to cellular biology that I would highly recommend for its fantastic illustrations and readable prose, whether you are familiar with the material or not:</p>


<ul>
<li>Goodsell, David.  <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Machinery-Life-DAVID-GOODSELL/dp/0387978461/ref=ed_oe_h">The Machinery of Life</a> (book, Amazon referral-less link)</li>
</ul>