As long as the reads align

It has been a long time since I last worked my way through a textbook. Reading DNA with Next Generation Sequencing is written for higher education students and professionals in bioinformatics and biomedical laboratory research. As such, it is not a coffee-table book, but as textbooks go, this is one that reads rather pleasantly.

Anglicisms

Authors and lecturers Ken Kraaijeveld and Bo Blanckenburg have written up the reasonably complex subject matter involved in Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) in nicely digestible chapters. For me, as an organic chemist with no NGS experience, it was quite easy to follow, despite the fact that I was not actively ‘studying’. That should offer some reassurance to the future students and professionals who will be presented with this book.

‘The illustrations genuinely add something to the book’

The book is written in Dutch, but – as the authors already caution in the preface – many technical terms have been deliberately rendered in English or as anglicisms, because that is simply how the field itself uses them. This is understandable, yet it can make the reading feel somewhat awkward at times, for example: ‘Once the reads have been aligned against the reference genome, the number of reads that align to each gene is determined.’ This is of course unavoidable, and the only alternative would probably be to write the book in English outright, or to coin a great many neologisms in order to properly describe this branch of science.

Illustration

What gives this book a further unique twist are the images. Blanckenburg has drawn on her experience from teaching the course Drawing for Your Work, which she delivers through the continuing education centre at the Hague University of Applied Sciences, to give visual form to the concepts in the book. The result is a set of clear illustrations that look professional yet also personal. They genuinely add something to the book.

All in all, this is a book that will truly advance the understanding of anyone with an interest in Next Generation Sequencing. It has certainly given me a firmer grasp of scientific papers that touch on these subjects.