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The human genome is fundamentally about information, and computers were essential both for the determination of the sequence and for the applications to biology and medicine that are already flowing from it. Computing contributed not only the raw capacity for processing and storage of data, but also the mathematically-sophisticated methods required to achieve the results. The marriage of biology and computer science has created a new field called bioinformatics. Today bioinformatics is an applied science. We use computer programs to make inferences from the data archives of modern molecular biology, to make connections among them, and to derive useful and interesting predictions. This book is aimed at students and practising scientists who need to know how to access the data archives of genomes and proteins, the tools that have been developed to work with these archives, and the kinds of questions that these data and tools can answer. Introduction to Bioinformatics organized with : Chapter 1 sets the stage and introduces all of the major players: DNA and protein sequences and structures, genomes and proteomes, databases and information retrieval, the World Wide Web and computer programming. Before developing individual topics in detail it is important to see the framework of their interactions. Chapter 2 presents the nature of individual genomes, including the Human Genome, and the relationships among them, from the biological point of view. Chapter 3 imparts basic skills in using the Web in bioinformatics. It describes archival databanks, and leads the reader through sample sessions, involving information retrieval from some of the major databases in molecular biology. Chapter 4 treats the analysis of relationships among sequences - alignments and phylogenetic trees. These methods underlie some of the major computational challenges of bioinformatics: detecting distant relatives, understanding relationships among genomes of different organisms, and tracing the course of evolution at the species and molecular levels. Chapter 5 moves into three dimensions, treating protein structure and folding. Sequence and structure must be seen as full partners, with bioinformatics developing methods for moving back and forth between them as fluently as possible. Understanding protein structures in detail is essential for determining their mechanisms of action, and for clinical and pharmacological applications.