Preface to the Fourth Edition

Eight years have elapsed since the previous edition, during which there have been

continuing rapid advances in many of the technologies used to obtain the raw

data of bioinformatics, such as DNA sequencing, as well as enormous increases in

widely available computing power, and discoveries have continued apace. There has

also been a global pandemic, combating which has been greatly assisted by bioin-

formatics, and which vastly boosted data acquisition. These developments alone

warranted thorough revision of the material in the book. The opportunity has also

been taken to somewhat rearrange the chapter topics, although admittedly in such a

multidimensional subject as bioinformatics there is probably no ideal arrangement.

There has been a significant increase in the space accorded to regulatory networks

and their analysis, which is now in better balance with the nucleic acid sequencing

aspects, which are usually perceived as the traditional subject matter of bioinfor-

matics; the transmission of information within the networks, and their architecture,

deserve comparable prominence. We are becoming accustomed to the idea that life is

organized heterarchically and that our DNA is just one of many features contributing

to a living organism, which must survive a lifetime in a changing environment, during

which its DNA sequence is not changing.

New material added includes forensic investigation, viruses, pandemics, domes-

tication, and multiomics. Nevertheless, every effort has been made to avoid unduly

increasing the overall length of the book. Many new references have been added, and

of course it has never been easier for a reader to find further information from the

vast, albeit uncritically accumulated, resources available on the World Wide Web.

The reader should be cautioned not to accept anything in this book—or indeed in

any other—as the last word. As Max Planck remarked at the end of his 17th Guthrie

lecture, delivered to the Physical Society in London in 1932: “… science does not

mean contemplative rest in possession of sure knowledge, it means untiring work

and steadily advancing development”.

Buckingham, UK

March 2023

Jeremy Ramsden

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