Source to OVERVIEW molecular biology

[Manel]

I'm a Med Student who is learning coding Matlab for bioinformatics. I would need to refresh the molecular biology concepts to understand any problem or situation that I encounter with with regards to analyzing experimental biological data through bioinformatics.

Could anybody please recommend me a good, clear and concise source (pdf, webpage, etc) to review molecular biology concepts overall?

So thankful!!!!

[Dagl1]

I suppose it depends a bit on which parts of molecular biology, textbooks like the Cell are good starters (but not very concise). You could also work your way through a list and search stuff yourself. 

Receptors, transporters, ECM, Translation+chaperones, Transcription, splicing, DNA replication, Histones and DNA methylation, mitochondria ATP synthase, fat metabolism, sugar metabolism, hormone functions (works on receptors again), neuronal transmission (synapses and action potentials), apoptosis/necrosis, cytoskeleton. There must be quite a lot more, but I suppose you could read up on these things without a textbook. 

Hope some others can give you a better source (book/pdf/webpage)!

[CharonY]

I disagree with that. The issue is that molecular biology has a lot of concepts with varying degrees of understanding. Any given list without proper context (i.e. being concise) is unlikely to be of a lot use for most students. What normally is more helpful is to specialize in particular question first. E.g. What do you want to model? For what purpose? What type of biological information do you want to analyze? What are the models you are comfortable using?

If you develop your research question you can assemble the tools and knowledge to tackle it. After you got some foundations, you can expand and see what else is out there. If, otoh you just wand an overview, I recommend a textbook. They provide certain viewpoint and context (often still incomplete) that will help you to understand why folks look at and analyze things a certain way. However, even the broadest texts will be fairly incomplete. Biology is often a hot mess of different concept, approaches and thoughts, even when dealing with the same phenomenon. This really just mirrors the complexity of biology itself and I have yet to see a successful student project that starts overly broad.

[Dagl1]

12 hours ago, CharonY said:

I disagree with that. The issue is that molecular biology has a lot of concepts with varying degrees of understanding. Any given list without proper context (i.e. being concise) is unlikely to be of a lot use for most students. What normally is more helpful is to specialize in particular question first. E.g. What do you want to model? For what purpose? What type of biological information do you want to analyze? What are the models you are comfortable using?

If you develop your research question you can assemble the tools and knowledge to tackle it. After you got some foundations, you can expand and see what else is out there. If, otoh you just wand an overview, I recommend a textbook. They provide certain viewpoint and context (often still incomplete) that will help you to understand why folks look at and analyze things a certain way. However, even the broadest texts will be fairly incomplete. Biology is often a hot mess of different concept, approaches and thoughts, even when dealing with the same phenomenon. This really just mirrors the complexity of biology itself and I have yet to see a successful student project that starts overly broad.

I think we fundamentally disagree on this topic, at least in the sense of 'review molecular biology concepts overall'. If the OP's question was purely; 'I am working in field x, modelling y and want to find more detailed information on this' then of course a list/textbook wouldn't be complete. But he asked 'to review molecular biology concepts overall', and preferably in a concise manner (I don't find textbooks concise in any sense of the word, but that may also have to do with the type of education my university offered (barely any lectures, and mostly discussion groups with a staff member (specialised in that topic), whereby everyone had to look up everything beforehand, then discuss and fill in each other's gaps. This method basically forced us (at least me) to just search everything on the internet, which is why I feel you can basically learn most of biology (at the level the OP is asking) as long as you have a list of things to look into/explain). 

@Manel I would like to note that Charon has infinitely more experience in research (and I assume teaching for that matter), so definitely give more weight to his answer than to mine (although I do keep standing behind the answer I have given).

[BabcockHall]

If you are looking for a basic reference book, you might find Fundamental Concepts of Bioinformatics by Krane and Raymer to be helpful, in that one of the authors is a biologist and the other a computer scientist.  It is a bit out of date, but it is inexpensive.

[Manel]

On 4/2/2020 at 9:50 AM, Dagl1 said:

I think we fundamentally disagree on this topic, at least in the sense of 'review molecular biology concepts overall'. If the OP's question was purely; 'I am working in field x, modelling y and want to find more detailed information on this' then of course a list/textbook wouldn't be complete. But he asked 'to review molecular biology concepts overall', and preferably in a concise manner (I don't find textbooks concise in any sense of the word, but that may also have to do with the type of education my university offered (barely any lectures, and mostly discussion groups with a staff member (specialised in that topic), whereby everyone had to look up everything beforehand, then discuss and fill in each other's gaps. This method basically forced us (at least me) to just search everything on the internet, which is why I feel you can basically learn most of biology (at the level the OP is asking) as long as you have a list of things to look into/explain). 

@Manel I would like to note that Charon has infinitely more experience in research (and I assume teaching for that matter), so definitely give more weight to his answer than to mine (although I do keep standing behind the answer I have given).

Thats the way I'd like to approach it: a general review rather than a detailed one. A short, concise summary.

[CharonY]

I do not think you can find then. Molecular biology is vast and has a lot of specialization even depending on what organisms you are looking at (animals? unicelluar? multi-cellular? plants? bacteria?). The list Dagl1 has clearly an eukaryotic slant, for example, and reading each of these points would get you a spotty overview at best.

Say you want to do perform bioinformatic genome analyses. For that, you should first figure out whether for what purpose and which organism. Pro- and eukaryotic genome have very different structures and data availability for example. In other words, even a concise overview requires a focal subject, otherwise you will get hopelessly lost.

Do you want analyze mass spec data? Whole different set of knowledge required. Again, Biology is heavily, heavily specialized. While there are disciplines that require some broader knowledge, you have to expand from a core. 

[Dagl1]

Oh that is definitely true, I completely disregarded all other forms of biology other than eukaryotic cells;/ my bad. My list would give you, admittedly a spotty and extremely general look (I wouldn't call it detailed, at least not if you are focusing on eukaryotic cells). I agree with Charon, it helps a lot if you tell us what exactly you want to analyse and which things you want to focus on. 

What type of organism (prokaryotic versus eukaryotic), If multicellular, are you looking at a particular cell type. What type of analysis will you perform? Will you be looking at a specific metabolic pathway? Are you looking at different species and comparing them? Are you looking at a particular protein or mechanism, or look at the effects of a drug on broader data? 

 

[Lorenzo1]

Hey, if you are looking for the basics of molecular biology, I recommend you a book that I use to study at the university. It calls: Life: The science of biology. 

It's a didactic book, but still, you can find a lot of informations that are very well explained in a pretty didactic way. 

I don't know if you are undergraduate, but i'm pretty sure that if you use this book to study the concepts of molecular biology, you will learn a lot of it.