Biotechnology and Bioinformatics (1+1)

10.1.1 Bioinformatics

• The term bioinformatics was coined by Paulien Hogeweg in 1979 for the study of informatic processes in biotic systems.

  Bioinformatics  is the application of statistics and computer science to the field of  molecular biology.

• Bioinformatics can also be defined as a “science of solving biological problem using a mathematical and computational approach”.
• Its primary use since the late 1980s has been in genomics and genetics, particularly in those areas of genomics involving large-scale DNA sequencing .

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.

The primary goal of bioinformatics is to

• uncover the wealth of biological information hidden in the mass of data and
• obtains a clever insight into the fundamental biology of organism. It focus on developing and applying computationally intensive techniques (e.g., pattern recognition , data mining , machine learning algorithms, and visualization ).

Major research efforts in the field include:

 sequence alignment , gene finding , genome assembly ,

drug design , drug discovery ,

protein structure alignment , protein structure prediction , prediction of gene expression and protein-protein interactions , genome-wide association studies and the modeling of evolution .