This is the second volume of a two-volume work describing methods from across the interdisciplinary subject of bioinformatics, or the management and analysis of data for the life sciences. Keith (School of Mathematical Sciences, Queensland U. of Technology, Australia) has organized the volume's 25 chapters into sections dealing with structures, inferring function, applications and disease, and analytical and computational methods. Specific topics include software for nucleic acid folding and hybridization, protein structure prediction, protein contact prediction, analysis of mass spectrometry data in proteomics, classification of protein domains, inferring function from homology, inferring functional relationships from conservation of gene order, phylogenetic profiling, sequence comparisons of multiple primate species, prediction of regulatory elements, expressions and microarrays, integrating functional genomics data, computational diagnostics with gene expression profiles, analysis of quantitative trait loci, molecular similarity concepts and search calculations, combinatorial optimization models for finding genetic signatures from gene expression datasets, genetic signatures for a rodent model of Parkinson's disease using combinatorial optimization methods, developing fixed-parameter algorithms to solve combinatorially explosive biological problems, and text mining. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)