Infectious Disease Informatics

In this book, Vitali Sintchenko brings together a collection of state-of-the-art reviews of informatics applications aiming to improve the diagnosis, prevention, treatment and control of infectious diseases. In response to the need for computational biology techniques geared towards clinical medicine, this volume covers the emerging domains of translational bioinformatics, genomics enabled decision support, intelligent design of vaccines and antimicrobial drugs as well as new types of biosurveillance. This book is written by a diverse, international group of experts in the field and provides clinicians, pathologists, biomedical researchers and informaticians with an essential resource that offers also a fascinating glimpse into the future of this dynamic field.

This book will be the first to leverage on recent breakthroughs in the rapid, high-throughput molecular profiling of pathogenic microorganisms, as well as text mining and the growing body of electronic sources of knowledge about the molecular epidemiology of pathogens with epidemic potential.The distinctive feature of this book is that its focus on bioinformatics enabled approaches to pathogen detection, investigation and management of infections. This volume also details new methods of analyzing the genetic and geographic data of pathogens to reconstruct their evolution and to identify the migration routes through which the strains spread regionally and internationally.This book will fill the existing gap in covering the bioinformatics aspects of infectious diseases and will complement numerous successful bioinformatics texts devoted to the mainstream of human genetics and cancer.

Informatics for Infectious Disease Research and Control.- Bioinformatics of Microbial Sequences.- Mining Databases for Microbial Gene Sequences.- Comparative Genomics of Pathogens.- Systems Microbiology: Gaining Insights in Transcriptional Networks.- Host-Pathogen Systems Biology.- Text Mining for Discovery of Host-Pathogen Interactions.- A Network Approach to Understanding Pathogen Population Structure.- Computational Epitope Mapping.- Pangenomic Reverse Vaccinology.- Immunoinformatics: The Next Step in Vaccine Design.- Understanding the Shared Bacterial Genome.- Computational Grammars for Interrogation of Genomes.- In silico Discovery of Chemotherapeutic Agents.- Informatics for Healthcare Epidemiology.- Automated, High-throughput Surveillance Systems for Public Health.- Microbial Genotyping Systems for Infection Control.- Temporal and Spatial Clustering of Bacterial Genotypes.- Infectious Disease Ontology.- Populations, Patients, Germs and Genes: Ethics Of Genomics and Informatics in Communicable Disease Control.