This comprehensive textbook presents a self-contained guide to bioinformatics, defined in its broadest sense as the application of information science to biology. Thoroughly updated and greatly expanded, this third edition now includes material on the growing array of "-omics"; covering metagenomics, toxicogenomics, glycomics, lipidomics, microbiomics and phenomics. New chapters have also been added on ecosystems management and the nervous system. Emphasis is placed on providing both a firm grounding in the core concepts and a clear overview of the complete field of bioinformatics. Features: explains the fundamentals of information science relevant to biology; covers both organismal (ontogeny and phylogeny, as well as genome structure) and molecular aspects; examines the most important practical applications of bioinformatics, providing detailed descriptions of both the experimental process and the data analysis; provides a varied selection of problems throughout the book, to stimulate further thinking.