IN SILICO IMMUNOLOGY

Whatever its final readership and impact, we, the Editors, feel this book is im­ portant. It addresses the realisation that there is a deep and abiding synergy, albeit one only now being properly explored and exploited, between immunol­ ogy and computational science. This area of intersection we christen in silico immunology. Immunology is an inspiration for computational scientists seek­ ing practical and philosophical metaphors for their work; but, at the same time, it is itself a biological discipline of such discombobulating complexity that only computational help as different as simulation and data warehousing can make its modern study tractable. Thus immunology both inspires but also requires computational science. This book deals in detail with the three main areas of in silico immunology: theoretical immunology, immunoinformatics, and artificial immune systems. While all of these are now well-established the interactions between the three are only beginning to be developed.