This book focuses on bioinformatics, the study of the management and analysis of information used in biological systems.  Particular emphasis explains to the reader how to study and extract useful information, such as relatedness of species, function of specific sequences, and genome organization from genomic sequences. 

This book focuses on the algorithmic aspects of bioinformatics and not on databases and software packages.  There are two important discriminating characteristics that sets the book apart.  It connects the algorithmic aspects and approaches to bioinformatics with the biological context while maintaining a user friendly and accessible description of the algorithms. The authors have curated the content for use a stand alone reference or the book will fit a one semester course on the subject.