Saturday, September 8, 2007

introduction to bioinformatics


BIO INFORMATICS.,the name itself gives us the whole meaning involved in the branch.It is the branch of biology dealing with informatics.Tonnes and tones of data is released daily from the wet labs,scientists,researchers etc.This information is useless unless it is sorted out in a manageable manner



Friends this is 21st century,every century had its own marking in the educational history.tn the same way this century is named as the INFORMATIC ERA.The two most important and the booming fields informatics and biology are combined in a very appreciable manner to form this bio informatics.

Bioinformatics involve the use of techniques including applied mathematics, informatics, statistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, chemistry, and biochemistry to solve biological problems usually on the molecular level. Research in computational biology often overlaps with systems biology. Major research efforts in the field include sequence alignment, gene finding, genome assembly, protein structure alignment, protein structure prediction, prediction of gene expression and protein-protein interactions, and the modeling of evolution.
The terms bioinformatics and computational biology are often used interchangeably. However bioinformatics more properly refers to the creation and advancement of algorithms, computational and statistical techniques, and theory to solve formal and practical problems inspired from the management and analysis of biological data. Computational biology, on the other hand, refers to hypothesis-driven investigation of a specific biological problem using computers, carried out with experimental or simulated data, with the primary goal of discovery and the advancement of biological knowledge. Put more simply, bioinformatics is concerned with the information while computational biology is concerned with the hypotheses. A similar distinction is made by National Institutes of Health in their working definitions of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, where it is further emphasized that there is a tight coupling of developments and knowledge between the more hypothesis-driven research in computational biology and technique-driven research in bioinformatics. Bioinformatics is also often specified as an applied subfield of the more general discipline of Biomedical informatics.
There are many databases and sites which deals with bio informatics..The most important and the basic one is the NCBI database,which help us in having the basic information about the proteins,chemicals,3d structures etc.The site for NCBI is
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/.
there are many sites and softwares ,useful which i’l be posting them in a short while.

4 comments:

Prabal Aggarwal said...

Hi Sowmya
Nice article
I was just curious to know, will the application parts like Iris Scan, will come under this field?
regards
Prabal

sowmya said...

thank you very much.coming to the iris scan,i dont think it comes under bio informatics.the other stream in engineering ,bio medical engineering deals with that topic.it deals with all the instruments and equipments needed for the medical use.

Prabal Aggarwal said...

Thanks a lot Sowmya. So, the bio informatics is the branch, which deals with the methodology of solving complex mathematical problems by simulating the biological reactions, and getting the natural result. Am i right?

sowmya said...

yeah,you are right.we create programs and softwares based on the mathematical formulas and basics.its really a good field with a lot of oppurtunities.