Python for the Life Sciences

Book excerpt: Treat yourself to a lively, intuitive, and easy-to-follow introduction to computer programming in Python. The book was written specifically for biologists with little or no prior experience of writing code - with the goal of giving them not only a foundation in Python programming, but also the confidence and inspiration to start using Python in their own research. Virtually all of the examples in the book are drawn from across a wide spectrum of life science research, from simple biochemical calculations and sequence analysis, to modeling the dynamic interactions of genes and proteins in cells, or the drift of genes in an evolving population. Best of all, Python for the Life Sciences shows you how to implement all of these projects in Python, one of the most popular programming languages for scientific computing. If you are a life scientist interested in learning Python to jump-start your research, this is the book for you. What You'll Learn Write Python scripts to automate your lab calculations Search for important motifs in genome sequences Use object-oriented programming with Python Study mining interaction network data for patterns Review dynamic modeling of biochemical switches Who This Book Is For Life scientists with little or no programming experience, including undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral researchers in academia and industry, medical professionals, and teachers/lecturers. “A comprehensive introduction to using Python for computational biology... A lovely book with humor and perspective” -- John Novembre, Associate Professor of Human Genetics, University of Chicago and MacArthur Fellow “Fun, entertaining, witty and darn useful. A magical portal to the big data revolution” -- Sandro Santagata, Assistant Professor in Pathology, Harvard Medical School “Alex and Gordon’s enthusiasm for Python is contagious” -- Glenys Thomson Professor of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley