Foreword Keith Wilson and John Walker; Preface Samuel Clokie and Andreas Hofmann; Tables and resources Andreas Hofmann; 1. Life science studies Samuel Clokie and Andreas Hofmann; 2. Basic principles Parisa Amani and Andreas Hofmann; 3. Cell culture techniques Anwar Baydoun; 4. Recombinant DNA techniques and molecular cloning Ralph Rapley; 5. Preparative biochemistry Samuel Clokie; 6. Electrophoresis Ralph Rapley; 7. Immunochemical techniques Katja Fischer; 8. Flow cytometry John Grainger and Joanne Konkel; 9. Radioisotope techniques Robert Slater; 10. Clinical biochemistry Gillian Rumsby; 11. Microscopy Stephen Paddock; 12. Centrifugation Kay Ohlendieck and Stephen Harding; 13. Spectroscopic techniques Anne Simon and Andreas Hofmann; 14. Basic techniques probing molecular structure and interactions Anne Simon and Joanne Macdonald; 15. Mass spectrometric techniques Sonja Hess and James MacRae; 16. Fundamentals of bioinformatics Cinzia Cantacessi and Anna Protasio; 17. Fundamentals of cheminformatics Paul Taylor; 18. The Python programming language Timothy Stevens; 19. Processing and visualisation of experimental data Jean-Baptiste Cazier; 20. Fundamental genome sequencing and annotation Pasi Korhonen and Robin Gasser; 21. Fundamentals of proteomics Sonja Hess and Michael Weiss; 22. Fundamentals of metabolomics James MacRae; 23. Enzymes and receptors Megan Cross and Andreas Hofmann; 24. Drug discovery and development David Camp.