Bioinformatics for Vaccinology

Preface

This book is a gentle but useful introduction to a seemingly recondite subject, but a subject of unrivalled importance nonetheless. It provides an informative overview and places computational vaccinology into context. It also seeks to proselytise the potential, and I believe growing importance, of in silico vaccinology.

This book is divided into seven chapters. Chapter One will serve as a historical introduction to the remainder of the book. While it must, of necessity, be somewhat superficial, Chapter One tries to outline some of key discoveries in, and discoverers of, vaccinology. Chapter Two deals with the threats addressed, and opportunities offered, by vaccine research to a world beset by climate change and bioterrorism. Chapter Three addresses in a more technical manner the immunological background to vaccines, with a special emphasis on problems which bioinformatics can tackle. Chapter Four deals with databases and their role within bioinformatics, albeit slanted towards immunology. Chapter Five explores the role for prediction methods in bioinformatic applications in vaccinology. Chapter Six deals with structural bioinformatics albeit within an immunological context. Chapter Seven addresses real world applications and draws together some of the dangling threads. The book will largely forego the worst excesses of the academic text, and thus avoid an overabundance of citations and foot-notes.

It is not my intention that this should necessarily be a book which anyone ...