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It’s an excellent textbook. You’ll need a base level of chemistry and biology - not two of my best subjects, But despite that I still got a lot of it.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21054/

Studying: The Molecular Biology of the Cell by Alberts et al and Advanced Macroeconomics by Romer.

https://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-of-the-Cell/dp/0815...

Having said that, Molecular Biology of the Cell (referred elsewhere) is a great book.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0815341067

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-Sixth-Bruce-Alberts...

It's much better if you read the relevant parts of these books and then ramp up from there with the papers that are actually relevant to your studies/work.

With that being said, the Molecular Biology of the Cell and the Biology of Cancer are also very enjoyable (but challenging) reads just for satisfying your curiousity. But don't expect to finish these within a 3 months.

https://brucealberts.ucsf.edu/current-projects/molecular-bio...

https://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-Sixth-Bruce-Alberts...

Molecular Biology of the Cell
http://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-Cell-Alberts-Al/dp/0...

The description of the DNA --> RNA --> protein pipeline was really satisfying to someone with my background, full of codes, error-correction algorithms, and rate-limiting steps. I think of it as the Numerical Recipes of biology.

MIT 5.111 Principles of Chemical Science, Fall 2014
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP63LOmB3_O0x...

Textbooks (free PDFs available on gen.lib.rus.ec):

Lehninger, Principles of Biochemistry
https://www.macmillanlearning.com/college/ca/product/Lehning...

Molecular Biology of the Cell
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21054/

* The Cell: A Molecular Approach, Cooper

* Molecular Biology of The Cell, Alberts

Theses are the main two books in the field of molecular biology. If you want to go more specific, let me know.

In the stats camp, Jaynes is fantastic, alas a bit difficult. But the prerequisites are very modest. It's self-contained.

Hoel, Port & Stone's volume is a great introduction to basic (w/o measure theory) probability.

This is something I wish to do over time, learn about a bunch of fields to, say, about undergraduate level. Right now I'm reading Molecular biology of the Cell (best textbook I've ever come across by the way) and it's rewarding to be able to understand much more of biology research news for example. And when you want to learn about some specific sub-topic on Wikipedia, you have the fundamentals to do that without saying "I know some of these words".

Molecular Biology of the Cell

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0815341059/?tag=hyprod-20&hvadi...

It's not on synthetic biology, mind you, but presumably some understanding of the natural biology is a prerequisite to doing the synthetic stuff. Anyway, he works for GSK doing some pretty interesting stuff and is an all around smart guy, so I tend to assume his recommendation is a good one. YMMV.

[1]: http://www.splatspace.org

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21054/

Probabilistically, it seems like authorities are the least likely to be wrong.

I dunno.

I've been studying cell biology on my spare time. I've been using The Molecular Biology of the Cell (http://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-Cell-Bruce-Alberts/d...) that in my opinion is a great book, and as far as I know, is well-respected in general.

Still, watching Sal's biology videos has been of great help. Although I think e.g. his organic chemistry videos are better executed (~10 minutes per video, a bit less packed, better splits by content), I still think that his biology videos are a super-valuable resource. I've been watching some MIT lectures too, but visualizations, which are necessary for biology, aren't properly visible in them. Of the free biology content in the web, Sal's videos are the best IMO.

The book and MIT course also give a good enough conceptual intro to the chemistry concepts you need too. Obviously the rabbit hole goes deeep tho... people spend lifetimes scratching the surface.

Do not let its silly title fool you. This is an excellent book containing real biology facts. Plus, unlike Molecular Biology of the Cell, if this book falls on you from a high shelf you have a chance to survive.

Of course, the book predates siRNA. Nothing ages faster than a molecular biology book.

Molecular Biology of the Cell ed 6 is from 2014

Molecular Biology fo the Gene is a bit older and I would generally not recommend people read it, but the problem is (IMHO) the alternative, Genetics by Lewin, is genetics-oriented instead of molecular biology, and I find that most CS folks understand MB and find genetics confusing.

Review articles are good, but I still recommend starting with textbooks before moving on to reviews.

You sound smart and comfortable with solving problems with a computer, yet you do not seem to be satisfied with developing applications for people to use in everyday life. Perhaps your calling is to develop computer programs to solve scientific problems. I am extrapolating from my experience here. I am an astrophysicist and do simulations for studying problems in stellar dynamics. It is really fun, but sometimes I wish I had the background in biology to have the option to switch to that field, since there seems to be tons of interesting problems and really smart guys there; in particular in molecular biology and in brain research. I think if I knew what I know now when I finished high school I would go for biology and not physics (this does not mean I regret my choice though, I do not), or at least take a few biology courses.

Unfortunately I cannot recommend many books. The only decent biology book I have is "The Molecular Biology of the Cell" by Alberts et al. It is really good. I have the feeling others here can make better/more recommendations if you ask. This is not necessarily an engaging book.

Good luck!

A nucleotide is one of [A,T,C,G]. So that means it encodes 2 bits of information.

473 * 1200 * 2 = 1 135 200 bits, or 141.9 kilobyte.

Of course, this is coming from a software developer using numbers from Google, so I might be wildly wrong.

[1] "Molecular biology of the cell" by Bruce Alberts

I actually think that formal courses are an excellent way to learn 'textbook' material, but they are far more useful when you know you are going to use that knowledge in the future. The question for me is whether, at the highest levels, we should be focusing our courses, and rewarding people for the equivalent of learning how to walk when we need them to fly.

But you'll probably benefit from taking an Edx course
https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-biology-the-secre...

To be clear, I'm not criticizing these books for not having the answers, or even for being wrong. It's being confidently, authoritatively wrong that is concerning. It also makes me wonder how much of what we read now is also authoritatively wrong. (I have my suspicious about cosmology.) A counterexample is the book "Molecular Biology of the Cell", which is good about explicitly pointing out what is unknown rather than papering over it.

- Organic Chemistry course on itunes U (don't remember which one, just first 4-5 lessons)

- Introduction to Genetics: A Molecular Approach by Terry Brown

- Virology course on iTunes U, by Vincent Racaniello - https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/w3310-virology-videocast...

- Molecular biology of the cell book ( https://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-Cell-Bruce-Alberts/... )

After going through that (took ~3 months full time), I went for a month to the Bay Area, went to Biocurious hackerspace, to get some practical experience, and within a month I did stuff like ordering custom dna online, and putting it into bacteria :)

All the above was sufficient to understand basics of whatever I'm reading now about biotech, and gain extra knowledge when necessary.

Some notes:
- Virology may seem a weird addition, but the course by Racaniello is super-fun, and if you understand how viruses work, you will understand how everything else works
- If, like me, you were afraid of Chemistry and Biology in high school, don't worry. Organic Chemistry deals just with just four basic elements, and Molecular Biology is really not much different from mechanics - not that much to remember, and a lot to understand.
- Even if you complete just 3-4 first chapters of all the above, you will get nice foundations for understanding biotech.
- There are bio hackerspaces in major cities in US (not so much in EU - regulations)

Molecular Biology of the Cell - Fifth Edition
http://www.garlandscience.com/textbooks/0815341059.asp

You can get a feel for lots of textbooks here, by searching within them for things you're interested in:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=books

As for the protein folding or the protein function question google around computational chemistry, but be warned -- this is tough stuff! But if you are shit hot, please come as we need the help...

Molecular Cell Biology - Lodish

http://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Cell-Biology-Harvey-Lodish/d...

Molecular Biology of the Cell - Alberts

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0815344325/

Sort of. Please read Molecular Biology of the Cell, Molecular Biology of the Gene, and Biochemistry. It's explained in detail (what people have observed). TL;DR: yeah, machinery in the cell binds to plasmids. No, it's not random- it's a highly biased process.

yes, we're learning a lot, but no, the promised revolutions aren't forthcoming. Not only are there technical reasons why it's unlikely we'll see a very near term revolution in treatment. There are huge political, monetary and bureaucratic reasons, too. They are just as important to understand as the technical reasons.

The Eighth Day of Creation

- statistics, probability, and especially probabilistic inference

- nix/gnutools

- multiple scripting languages (Ruby, Python, Perl, BASH)

- at least one data-oriented language (R, Octave)

- understanding of molecular biology (read Molecular Biology of the Cell)

- applying machine learning tools to new problems

- understanding the major high throughput biological technologies and the kinds of data they produce, along with the current tools used for processing the data

You could pick up all of that in a year of intense self-study, and less assuming you already have some of those skills.

I'm not sure whether to recommend Dennett's Consciousness Explained or to compel the questioner to work through The Molecular Biology of the Cell, followed by (e.g.) Hölldobler and Wilson's Journey to the Ants -- and then keep going -- before trying to dismiss the complexity of a network of neurons with the wave of one hand.

The amount of complexity is just absolutely insane. My favourite example: DNA is read in triplets. So, for example, "CAG" adds one Glutamine to the protein it's building[1].

There are bacteria that have optimised their DNA in such a way that you can start at a one-letter offset, and it encodes a second, completely different, but still functional protein.

I found the single cell to be the most interesting subject. But of course it's a wild ride from top to bottom. The distance from brain to leg is too long, for example, to accurately control motion from "central command". That's why you have rhythm generators in your spine that are modulated from up high (and also by feedback).

Every human sensory organ activates logarithmically: Your eye works with sunlight (half a billion photons/sec) but can detect a single photon. If you manage to build a light sensor with those specs, you'll get a Nobel Prize and probably half of Apple...

[0]: https://amzn.to/2zzDt8P

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_codon_table

* Human Molecular Genetics by Strachan and Read -- this is a tome, but it's a great introductory reference to the field. (A lot of first-year grad students read this book when coming to molecular genetics from engineering and CS, incidentally.)

* Molecular Biology of the Cell, by Alberts et al. -- an even bigger tome, but one you'll find on every researcher's bookshelf.

* Genes NN by Lewin (where NN is an ever-increasing roman numeral; you can estimate the amount of time someone has been in the field by the size of the roman numeral on their copy) -- this is more of an undergraduate introduction to molecular genetics. The other books (especially MBC) are more useful as references, but this book is fairly accessible to newcomers.

* Recombinant DNA by Watson et al. -- I hesitate to include this in the list, because it's now sadly outdated (written in 1992), but I still think it's one of the best-written, most accessible introductions to things like transgenics, genetic engineering, etc. Describes everything in a friendly, Scientific American style. It's also small. If you want a quick, friendly introduction to what was state-of-the-art 15 years ago, this is a great book.

I know that most of these books are kind of thick, and that you said you didn't want to digest the whole curriculum, but I don't tend to read pop-science books in this field. I don't have much of an opinion on any particular popularization of molecular genetics. But if you want to gain a real understanding of molecular biology, these are the books you'd most likely be told to buy for molecular genetics 101 at your local university.

PS: the giant metal birds eat Acme brand exploding bird seed, naturally....

I was also thinking that a non-fiction book with no fluff and no injection of personality/flair from the author is a textbook. There are many outstanding textbooks (like Molecular Biology of the Cell) which offer pure information, but I think commercial non-fiction books are aimed at a more general audience. The author needs to fluff a book up a bit to make the material approachable. I also wonder how some non-fiction books would read if untouched by editors.

[1]. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21054/

[2]. http://www.nature.com/encode/

The NYTimes article is a bit strange, though, trying to politicize epigenetics through the "mommy wars". The article also muddles the difference between genetic issues due to aging fathers and epigenetic issues. The recent Icelandic study links mutations in sperm from aging fathers to autism and schizophrenia, which is genetic (the mutations show up in genome sequencing), so it's basically irrelevant to the article's epigenetic thesis. The NYTimes article mentions a theory that maybe epigenetic regulation is reducing DNA repair and causing mutations, but that's a pretty tenuous connection.

It's silly to turn this into a "blame game", but it is interesting that males and females contribute different types of genetic errors: females typically introduce chromosome errors, while males introduce DNA mutations. 20% of human eggs have the wrong number of chromosomes, compared with 3-4% of sperm. A cell has to split the chromosomes twice in meiosis to form a gamete, which is a difficult process where a lot can go wrong. Eggs sit around potentially for decades and then need to twice split properly, and this becomes much more error-prone with age. The first split happens at ovulation, and the second at fertilization (which is much later than I'd expect). These errors in chromosome separation are the leading cause of miscarriage and mental retardation. On the other hand, males are the main source of DNA mutations, since sperm are constantly being created, and each round of DNA replication has a chance to introduce errors. [Reference: Molecular Biology of the Cell, chapter 21, which is an interesting book]

Last week I read the book "The Epigenetics Revolution", which I recommend as it gives a good description of epigenetics. http://www.amazon.com/The-Epigenetics-Revolution-Understandi... (non-affiliate link)

It costs more but it's worth it. It's a deeply informative book that covers a large spectrum of topics that you can read without much background knowledge in biology. It's the same book your doctor or bioinformatics professional probably used in school learning about cellular biology.

Fourth post on the page gives a source:
This is from Molecular Biology of the Cell (4th Edition) 2004. Alberts et al. Textbook.
"Each human cell contains approximately 2 meters of DNA if stretched end-to-end"

Perhaps a human cell contains several DNA molecules?