Illustrates the Complex Biochemical Relations that Permit Life to ExistIt can be argued that the dawn of the 21st century has emerged as the age focused on molecular biology, which includes all the regulatory mechanisms that make cellular biochemical reaction pathways stable and life possible. For biomedical engineers, this concept is essential to

The stone fruits-including peaches, apricots, almonds, plums, and cherries-have been bred and grown for thousands of years and today are significant agricultural crops in many local economies worldwide. This volume presents a comprehensive commentary on classical genetics and breeding, molecular mapping and breeding of agronomic traits, and the clo

Musa is one of three genera in the family of Musaceae. Over 50 species of Musa exist, including bananas and plantains. This book assembles the latest information on the genomic research of this genus. A group of leading experts in Musa genetics, genomics, and breeding provide basic as well as advanced information for those interested in learning more about the banana genome. The accessible style is easily understood by students and researchers, making the book an ideal springboard for those looking to do expanded research into this crop.

Due to their diversity, vegetable Brassicas are of great economic import and offer unique opportunities to enrich our knowledge about plant growth, development, and rapid phenotypic evolution. By applying emerging genomic technologies, we may greatly increase our understanding of the Brassica biology and breeding efficiency. This volume contains 11

Grapevine is a highly valuable crop worldwide, both from a cultural as well as a commercial point of view. One of its major advantages is that it is well adapted to scarce water conditions. The main object of grapevine breeding is to develop varieties that are resistant to pathogens and at the same time well-adapted to a changing environment. Since

This volume covers the advances in the study of tomato diversity and taxonomy. It examines the mapping of simple and complex traits, classical genetics and breeding, association studies, molecular breeding, positional cloning, and structural and comparative genomics. The contributors also discuss transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and bioinformatics. The information in this book will be useful to researchers working on other Solanaceaous crops as well as those interested in using the tomato as a model crop species.

Eucalypts are used for the production of paper products, firewood, charcoal, potential feedstocks for bioenergy and biomaterials, as ornamentals and landscape trees, and in land rehabilitation. Eucalypt breeding is at an early stage with many plantings being only at the first stages of domestication. The relatively small genomes of these species make the application of molecular genetics approaches attractive. The application of modern genomics will accelerate the development of improved eucalypts for a wide range of uses. This book brings together diverse information on the genetics, genomics, and breeding of these important forest species.

Nowadays bioinformaticians and geneticists are faced with myriad high-throughput data usually presenting the characteristics of uncertainty, high dimensionality and large complexity. These data will only allow insights into this wealth of so-called 'omics' data if represented by flexible and scalable models, prior to any further analysis. At the interface between statistics and machine learning, probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) represent a powerful formalism to discover complex networks of relations. These models are also amenable to incorporating a priori biological information. Network reconstruction from gene expression data represents perhaps the most emblematic area of research where PGMs have been successfully applied. However these models have also created renewed interest in genetics in the broad sense, in particular regarding association genetics, causality discovery, prediction of outcomes, detection of copy number variations, and epigenetics. This book provides an overview of the applications of PGMs to genetics, genomics and postgenomics to meet this increased interest. A salient feature of bioinformatics, interdisciplinarity, reaches its limit when an intricate cooperation between domain specialists is requested. Currently, few people are specialists in the design of advanced methods using probabilistic graphical models for postgenomics or genetics. This book deciphers such models so that their perceived difficulty no longer hinders their use and focuses on fifteen illustrations showing the mechanisms behind the models. Probabilistic Graphical Models for Genetics, Genomics and Postgenomics covers six main themes: (1) Gene network inference (2) Causality discovery (3) Association genetics (4) Epigenetics (5) Detection of copy number variations (6) Prediction of outcomes from high-dimensional genomic data. Written by leading international experts, this is a collection of the most advanced work at the crossroads of probabilistic graphical models and genetics, genomics, and postgenomics. The self-contained chapters provide an enlightened account of the pros and cons of applying these powerful techniques.

Annotation. In this comprehensive research book issues associated with poultry breeding are addressed, by examining quantitative and molecular genetics and the uses of transgenic technology. The important area of disease resistance and transmission is also covered in a special section looking at the genetics of disease resistance. This book represents the first complete integration of our current knowledge of biotechnology and quantitative and molecular genetics as applied to poultry breeding.

Sequencing of the maize genome has opened up new opportunities in maize breeding, genetics and genomics research. This book highlights modern trends in development of hybrids, analysis of genetic diversity, molecular breeding, comparative and functional genomics, epigenomicsand proteomics in maize. The use of maize in biofuels, phytoremediation and