The second edition of Instant Notes in Bioinformatics introduced the readers to the themes and terminology of bioinformatics. It is divided into three parts: the first being an introduction to bioinformatics in biology; the second covering the physical, mathematical, statistical and computational basis of bioinformatics, using biological examples wherever possible; the third describing applications, giving specific detail and including data standards. The applications covered are sequence analysis and annotation, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolite study, supramolecular organization, systems biology and the integration of-omic data, physiology, image analysis, and text analysis.