BioMed Central Page 1 of 2 (page number not for citation purposes) Virology Journal Open Access Book report Review of ”Bioinformatics for vaccinology“ edited by Darren R. Flower Dae-Won Kim and Hong-Seog Park* Address: Genome Research Center, Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology, Daejeon 305-806, Korea Email: Dae-Won Kim - todaewon@kribb.re.kr; Hong-Seog Park* - hspark@kribb.re.kr * Corresponding author Abstract Book review of "Bioinformatics for vaccinology" edited by Darren R. Flower. Book details Flower DR: Bioinformatics for vaccinology Wiley-Backwell; 2008:292. ISBN 978-0-470-02711-0 Book review The study of vaccines has captured the attention of the biomedical and public communities for the past hundred years, largely because vaccines play a key role in affecting lifespan and well being, as well as economics. A positive trend in the field of vaccinology has been inspired by recent major breakthroughs in the fields of molecular biology, physiology, genomics, proteomics, and comput- ers that promise a bright future for the prevention of infec- tious diseases and allergies. This book focuses on a fundamental understanding of the primary role of vac- cines from a historical perspective, the immune system in molecular cell biology and computational approaches that show the link between experiment and theory. The major portion of the book is divided into seven chap- ters. Chapter one provides a historical background of vac- cination that acts as a framework for the remainder of the book. Overall, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of several interesting subjects based on effective and efficient efforts at developing vaccines. Chapter two focuses on the introductory need and opportunity for vac- cines, followed by the role of unprecedented phenome- non, such as rapid changes in economic status, climate and infectious disease. Chapter three describes how a rig- orous biological perspective of the molecular immune system is a fundamental requirement for the development of computational algorithms to explain how vaccines work. It further provides a discussion of how informatics approaches can give a glimpse of vaccine discovery. Chap- ter four contains an introduction into '-omics' and reviews the most important biological sequence databases, such as the host databases, immunological databases, patho- gen databases, and T cell and B cell databases. Chapter five describes the computational challenges in predicting T cell and B cell epitopes and in allergen discovery. Moreo- ver, it provides a description of computational algo- rithms, including artificial neural networks (ANN), hidden Markov models (HMM), support vector machines (SVM), and introduces statistical models to assess predic- tion accuracy. Chapter six presents protein structural approaches for experimental screening using 3D-QSAR or for virtual screening (VS). Chapter seven addresses the importance and potential of computational vaccinology in the post-genomic era. This book has several strong points. Although there are many textbooks that deal with vaccinology, few attempts have been made to bring together descriptions of vaccines in history, basic bioinformatics, various computational solutions and challenges in vaccinology, detailed experi- mental methodologies, and cutting-edge technologies. Published: 24 June 2009 Virology Journal 2009, 6:85 doi:10.1186/1743-422X-6-85 Received: 10 June 2009 Accepted: 24 June 2009 This article is available from: http://www.virologyj.com/content/6/1/85 © 2009 Kim and Park; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Publish with BioMed Central and every scientist can read your work free of charge "BioMed Central will be the most significant development for disseminating the results of biomedical research in our lifetime." Sir Paul Nurse, Cancer Research UK Your research papers will be: available free of charge to the entire biomedical community peer reviewed and published immediately upon acceptance cited in PubMed and archived on PubMed Central yours — you keep the copyright Submit your manuscript here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/publishing_adv.asp BioMedcentral Virology Journal 2009, 6:85 http://www.virologyj.com/content/6/1/85 Page 2 of 2 (page number not for citation purposes) The book is aimed at researchers with a working knowl- edge of disease, the nature of vaccines, computational approaches and system biology. The lesser focus on basic concepts and theories may make this book undesirable as a textbook for beginners or undergraduate students in vac- cinology. However, the book contains a large amount of information on computation and experimental tech- niques that would be highly useful in the study of vaccines and in the pharmaceutical industry or for researchers who intend to prepare and use vaccines in their research. This book may well serve as a first line of reference for all biol- ogists and computer scientists. One of the major goals of the incorporation of bioinfor- matics into vaccinology is to aid in the design of vaccines and to apply informatics approaches to the development of novel therapeutics and vaccine candidates. This book provides details of basic vaccinology and its application, beginning with a consideration of computational approaches. This presentation should provide readers of this book the opportunity to absorb the information about the biological immune system, the mathematical methods and the immunoinformatics. Overall, this text- book would be an excellent addition to the bookshelf of most scientists who encounter vaccinology in the drug discovery and development processes. Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Authors' contributions DK: conception, drafting and final approval of the manu- script. HP: drafting and final approval of the manuscript. . BioMed Central Page 1 of 2 (page number not for citation purposes) Virology Journal Open Access Book report Review of ”Bioinformatics for vaccinology“ edited by Darren R. Flower Dae-Won Kim. hspark@kribb.re.kr * Corresponding author Abstract Book review of "Bioinformatics for vaccinology" edited by Darren R. Flower. Book details Flower DR: Bioinformatics for vaccinology. development for disseminating the results of biomedical research in our lifetime." Sir Paul Nurse, Cancer Research UK Your research papers will be: available free of charge to the entire biomedical