Bioinformatics Topics

• amino acid sequences
• bioinformatics and computational biology
• protein sequences
• protein domains
• protein structures
• biotic systems
• protein structure
• rapid developments
• molecular biology
• mathematical formulas
• biological data
• statistical techniques
• homology
• biological processes
• analyzing and interpreting data
• information technologies
• nucleotide
• disciplines
• dna
• decades

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Bioinformatics, Bioinformatics

The term bioinformatics was coined by Paulien Hogeweg in 1978 for the study of informatic processes in biotic systems. Bioinformatics now entails the creation and advancement of databases, algorithms, computational and statistical techniques, and theory to solve formal and practical problems arising from the management and analysis of biological data. Over the past few decades rapid developments in genomic and other molecular research technologies and developments in information technologies have combined to produce a tremendous amount of information related to molecular biology. It is the name given to these mathematical and computing approaches used to glean understanding of biological processes. Common activities in bioinformatics include mapping and analyzing DNA and protein sequences, aligning different DNA and protein sequences to compare them and creating and viewing 3-D models of protein structures.

Therefore, the field of bioinformatics has evolved such that the most pressing task now involves the analysis and interpretation of various types of data, including nucleotide and amino acid sequences, protein domains, and protein structures. The actual process of analyzing and interpreting data is referred to as computational biology. Important sub-disciplines within bioinformatics and computational biology include: a) the development and implementation of tools that enable efficient access to, and use and management of, various types of information. b) the development of new algorithms (mathematical formulas) and statistics with which to assess relationships among members of large data sets, such as methods to locate a gene within a sequence, predict protein structure and/or function, and cluster protein sequences into families of related sequences.

In the genomic branch of bioinformatics, homology is used to predict the function of a gene: if the sequence of gene A , whose function is known, is homologous to the sequence of gene B, whose function is unknown, one could infer that B may share A's function. In the structural branch of bioinformatics, homology is used to determine which parts of a protein are important in structure formation and interaction with other proteins. In a technique called homology modeling, this information is used to predict the structure of a protein once the structure of a homologous protein is known. This currently remains the only way to predict protein structures reliably.

The availability of these service-oriented bioinformatics resources demonstrate the applicability of web based bioinformatics solutions, and range from a collection of standalone tools with a common data format under a single, standalone or web-based interface, to integrative, distributed and extensible bioinformatics workflow management systems.

Source: Wikipedia > Bioinformatics