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.
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’s a work-in-progress of said list.
I have partially or fully read, and recommend:
- Cohen, Jacques. Bioinformatics: An Introduction for Computer Scientists . (PDF)
- Cohen, Jacques. Computer Science and Bioinformatics. (PDF)
- Cohen, William. A Computer Scientist’s Guide to Cell Biology. (book, publisher’s site)
- Hunter, Lawrence (editor). Artificial Intelligence and Molecular Biology.. (full text in HTML)
For the last entry, especially note chapters 1, “Molecular Biology for Computer Scientists,” and 2, “The Computational Linguistics of Biological Sequences .”
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:
- Goodsell, David. The Machinery of Life (book, Amazon referral-less link)