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I am wondering if there are some introductory learning resources on molecular biology designed specifically for scientists with heavily math-oriented curricula (math/physics/computer science).

They should be capable of conveying the main ideas in a concise way; if they could represent some concepts in a mathematical language, that would be a big plus.

Additional details

As it was pointed out in the comment, molecular biology is a very broad field so I should be more specific - although it is difficult for me. Personally, I would like to acquire some basic knowledge to interpret NGS data and go in the direction of system biology.

Dr Fabio Gori
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  • If it's a concise overview you're after, I'd recommend anything from the instant notes series. – James May 16 '16 at 00:28
  • from wiki, quantitative research is the systematic empirical investigation of observable phenomena via statistical, mathematical or computational techniques.This definition applies to any empirical science (which excludes math). So I am not quite sure what you mean by "quantitative scientists" – Remi.b May 16 '16 at 01:32
  • Molecular biology is a big field. Are you sure you don't want to narrow it down to any subfield of molecular biology? If you are rather interested in system biology, in molecular biophysics, in molecular genetics, in biochemistry or in molecular population genetics for examples you might want to specify. – Remi.b May 16 '16 at 01:39
  • @Remi.b ok, I have just edited to be more specific – Dr Fabio Gori May 16 '16 at 22:42
  • @Remi.b So I guess molecular genetics and cell biology are the most relevant ones for NGS data analysis and system biology, but I am very ignorant so your feedback would be appreciated. – Dr Fabio Gori May 16 '16 at 22:53

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I have also come from purely non-Bio background (I am a Software/Electrical engineer who didn't study Bio even in his high-school). As others have pointed out in comments above that Molecular Biology is a vast field. But if you want resources covering all the basics of Genetics/Molecular Genetics, then I can easily recommend the following to anyone (which are both easy to understand and very authentic ones):

There are other books like this one but they all are on bioinformatics/advanced and expect some knowledge of Molecular Biology. My recommendation (proved one) are above two. Best of luck!!

Failed Scientist
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I haven't started it yet, but practical computing for biologists by Haddock and Dunn might be a good place to start. Its what I will use for my Bioinformatics class. This course looks at large sets of genomic data and seeks to use analytical programs to parse out the data into codons, genes, single nucleotide polymorphisms, and mutations. If you can write a code to identify it you can sequence the genome of whatever your interested in an let the program do its thing. You just have to know the language and get comfortable with some beefy programs.

MadMolecularMan
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  • I like this book and strongly recommend it. However, not for the OP. The book is for biologists needing to learn programming whereas the OP is a computer scientists needing to learn biology. – Richard Erickson May 25 '16 at 13:27