Primary MATLAB® for Life Sciences: Guide for Beginners

The purposes, principal audience, the main topics, and chapter design are described here. MATLAB® advances in comparison to such popular software as Mathematica, Mathcad, Maple, and R, are briefly lightened. The differences between the present and author’s previous book are discussed briefly.

The MATLAB® windows, starting procedures; basic language constructions and commands; vectors, matrix and array manipulations, flow control operations are presented in this chapter. Basic commands are demonstrated on various bio-applications such as RNA volume computing, Arrhenius’ equation, RNA bases, and many others. The questions and life-science problems together with answers to some of them are given in conclusion.

Available two and three dimensional graphic commands are described in the chapter. The line, bar, histogram, and many other plots are generated with the MATLAB® plotting tool. The appropriate commands with their graphical possibilities are presented by examples of bio-data, equilibrium reaction, microorganism population growth, Ponderal index, etc. The questions and life-science problems together with answers to some of them are given in conclusion.

Editor Window, script- and function files are accurately described. The commands for solving algebraic equation, for integration, differentiation, interpolation and extrapolation are introduced with applications to numerical problems of bioengineering, particularly such as heat sterilization time, population dynamics, bacterial population amount, etc. The questions and life-science problems together with answers to some of them are given in conclusion.

Specific ordinary differential equations and the ODE solver are briefly presented together with examples for bio-systems that can be represented by differential equations, one or a set. The solutions are demonstrated for the bio-molecular reaction, the predator-prey model, the drug dissolution, the batch reactor, etc. The questions and life-science problems together with answers to some of them are given in conclusion.

The polynomial fitting commands and time series calculations are presented. The Basic Fitting and Time Series Tool interfaces are introduced through applications to the drug dose-blood pressure relation, the hazardous substances level in the air, the plankton concentration, time series forecasting, temperature monthly average predictions, and others. The questions and life-science problems together with answers to some of them are given in conclusion.

The list of MATLAB® special characters, scalar and matrix operators, commands and functions are presented in the alphabetical order.

The MATLAB® windows modifications, introduced by the R2012b version, are briefly described. The Desktop and Editor toolstrips, and redesigned Help Window is presented.