Review of three Recent Books on the Boundary of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology

* Correspondence: E.Bullinger@ulg. ac.be Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Montefiore Institute) and GIGA (Interdisciplinary Cluster for Applied Geno-proteomics), Université de Liège, Belgium • Bioinformatics for Systems Biology by S. Krawetz (Ed.), Springer, February 2009 (2 ed.) ISBN: 978-1-934115-02-2 (BSB) • Systems Biology and Bioinformatics: A Computational Approach by K. Najarian, C. Eichelberger, S. Najarian and S. Gharibzadeh, CRC Press, April 2009, ISBN: 9781420046502 (SBB) • Biomolecular Networks: Methods and Applications in Systems Biology by L. Chen, R.-S. Wang and X.-S. Zhang, Wiley, July 2009, ISBN: 978-0470243732 (BN) Systems biology is a holistic approach combining experimental data on multiple levels, from the genome and proteome over the interactome to signalling and metabolism in single cells, organs and organisms with the use of computational methods and predictive mathematical models. Bioinformatics is the application of computer science to biological systems, in particular for genomic data. This point of view is shared by the three books, published within a few months last year. All three books target a general audience with basic knowledge of biology, mathematics and computer science and cover quite similarly topics. An obvious difference between these books is their size: there is roughly a two-fold increase from SBB to BN and from the latter to BSB, which distinguished itself from the other two by being a collection of chapters by different authors, with different writing and presentation styles. All books contain an introduction to biology and to the mathematics needed in the remainder. BSB presents in a complete, very detailed and illustrated manner the cellular organisation over gene expression up to protein synthesis and cell signalling, in over 100 pages. These chapters contain glossaries and further references and are even suited for biologists in need of a recap. The introduction also contains a chapter on the epigenetics of spermiogenesis, whose style and specificity seems somehow misplaced in this part of the book, as it is more a research article than a review or textbook article as the other chapters of Part I. Also the chapter “Genomic Analysis of Transcription” might have been better placed in Part III “Transcriptome Analysis”. BN’s biological introduction is significantly shorter: just a few pages, contains a few graphical illustrations and is already very directed towards networks, highlighting their presence from gene regulation to signalling. SBB takes a middle road, the introduction is proportionally longer, however the presentation is fundamentally different, almost as a listicle (heading with one or two paragraphs, or even just lists) without graphical illustrations. Bullinger and Schliemann BioMedical Engineering OnLine 2010, 9:33 http://www.biomedical-engineering-online.com/content/9/1/33