Automation: Genomic and Functional Analyses

Automation is the major future trend for many areas in microbiology, molecular biology, and biochemistry, among other disciplines. It is an enormously exciting area, where techniques and assays that were once repetitive, tedious, and time consuming can be performed robotically, liberating the time of researchers and hospital laboratory workers for more interesting work. Many techniques have now been automated and often miniaturized, including PCR analysis, DNA/RNA preparation, diagnostic test (e.g., Pap tests), compound screening, and of course, sequencing. Some major advances, notably in Professor Leroy Hood's group, have resulted in the ability to perform thousands of assays simultaneously on a normal microscope slide.

Automation, edited by two of the leading experts in the field, presents the very latest experimental techniques explained in detail. This book has succeeded in bringing together researchers at the forefront of clone library construction, genome analysis, sequencing, computational data evaluation and functional analysis, to provide insight into this "new age" of research based on genomic and chemical screening.

Describes automated procedures used in microbiology and molecular biologyIncludes developments in robotics and vision systemsFeatures automation in library picking, presentation and analysisDiscusses paralogous duplications in microbial genomesCovers deciphering genomes through automated large-scale sequencingDescribes and stresses the need for functional analysesInternationally acclaimed contributors, including Professor Leroy Hood

L. Hood, Foreword.
U. Pettersson, Introduction.
A. Fife and D.W.M. Crook, Automation in Clinical Microbiology.
A.J.McCollum, Vision Systems for Automated Colony and Plaque Picking.
D.R. Bancroft, E. Maier and H. Lehrach, Library Picking, Presentation and Analysis.
G. Kauer and H. Blöcker, The PREPSEQ Robot: An Integrated Environment for Fully Automated and Unattended Plasmid Preparations and Sequencing Reactions.
A.N. Hale, Building Realistic Automated Production Lines for Genetic Analysis.
A.N. Hale, Examples of Automated Genetic Analysis Developments.
L. Rowen, S. Lasky and L. Hood, Deciphering Genomes Through Automated Large-scale Sequencing.
N.C. Hauser, M. Scheideler, S. Matysiak, M. Vingron and J.D. Hoheisel, DNA Arrays for Transcriptional Profiling.
K.-J. Reiger, G. Orlowska, A. Kaniak, J.-Y. Coppee, G. Alijinovic and P.P. Slonimski, Large-scale Phenotypic Analysis in Microtitre Plates of Mutants with Deleted Open Reading Frames From Yeast Chromosome III: Key-step Between Genomic Sequencing And Protein Function.
J.J. Codani, J.P. Comet, J.C. Aude, E. Glémet, A. Wozniak, J.L. Risler, A. Hénaut and P.P. Slonimski, Automatic Analysis of Large-scale Pairwise Alignments of Protein Sequences.
M.Y. Galperin and D. Frishman, Towards Automated Prediction of Protein Function from Microbial Genomic Sequences.
Index.