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Comment by waterlesscloud | Hacker News Reader

I know next to nothing about this field, but I just sort of brute-forced my way through the OP paper with the help of wikipedia. It's a painful process. :-)

But it has piqued my curiosity about the field. Are there any good introductory books/websites for the curious layman to get a grounding?

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Depends on what level. Wikipedia is actually quite good for this sort of thing. The classic book as a basic overview of molecular biology in general is the Molecular Biology of the Cell [1]. A really cool website to look at on cutting edge studies such as these is the ENCODE consortium's publications in Nature [2]. They simultaneously published 30 papers last year, and this is a really cool meta page that explains the ENCODE project and what they found.

[1]. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21054/

[2]. http://www.nature.com/encode/

Robert Sapolsky[0] has his Stanford course on human behavioral biology on youtube, almost in its entirety. The whole course is very accessible and much broader than the topic here, but if you wanna go straight for the molecular genetics section, it's parts 4 & 5. Amazing lecturer.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sapolsky

Oh and for Codon usage in general, a really good review can be found here [1].

[1]. http://people.cs.vt.edu/~heath/VTMENA/CodonBias/PlotkinKudla...

"Tales from Genome" course on Udacity is pretty awesome, although at times painfully anal/detailed with regards to assignments.

I think you can skip those, though.

https://www.udacity.com/course/bio110

The Machinery of Life [1] is a fantastic book, I was one of those curious laymen and boy did it saturate my thirst for learning about microbiology. I think it's close to the time I read it again.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Machinery-Life-David-Goodsell/dp/0...

Edit: Whoops, no Markdown support. Revised link to use footnote.

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