Bioinformatics is just application of It[information technology in MB[molecularbiology.
Application of computer technology to the management of biological information. Computers are used to gather, store, analyze and integrate biological and genetic information which can then be applied to gene-based drug discovery and development. The need for Bioinformatics capabilities has been precipitated by the explosion of publicly available genomic information resulting from the Human Genome Project. The goal of this project – determination of the sequence of the entire human genome (approximately three billion base pairs) – will be reached by the year 2002. The science of Bioinformatics, which is the melding of molecular biology with computer science, is essential to the use of genomic information in understanding human diseases and in the identification of new molecular targets for drug discovery. In recognition of this, many universities, government institutions and pharmaceutical firms have formed bioinformatics groups, consisting of computational biologists and bioinformatics computer scientists. Such groups will be key to unraveling the mass of information generated by large scale sequencing efforts underway in laboratories around the world.
Bioinformatics deals with main applications involve
sequence analysis,genome annotation,computational evolutionary biology, biodiversity, analysis of gene expression, analysis of regulation, analysis of geneexpression, comparitive genomics, protien structure analysis
sequence analysis: analysisng dna sequences and finding out the genes that sequences that code for the polypeptides which for the basic for the protien synthesis.
Genome annotation:the word annotation indicates marking which applies to genes as marking the particular gens that code for particular protien.The first genome annotating software was found in 1995 by Dr.OwenWhite.
Biodiversity: In the great gene pool of different organisms there exists difference or diversity in genes and sequences . this may be because of climatic or genetic changes that occur which finally comes out with biodiversity..
Analysis of gene expresion:
The geneexpression levels can be estimates based on the mRNA levels .mRNA levels can be determines by techniques like
microarrays, Serial Analysis of Gene Expresion[SAGE],Expressed Sequence Tags[EST] Massively Parralel Signature Sequencing techniques.
Analysis of regulation:
Regulation is the process of controlling .Gene regulation is defined as the process of contolling either increaseing or decreasing the process of geneexpression with the assistance of harmones.Role of bioinformatics in generegulation is that it helps in anlysis of the motifs which enhances the process of geenregulation.
Comparitive genomics
It is the speacial part of bioinformatics where there exists the comparison of sequences of the species thus helping in understanding the similarities and disimilarities between the species,.compartitive genomics plays an important role in building up of evolutionary relationships among the species.
Prediction of protien structure:
bioinformatics plays an imporant role in the prediction of structure of protiens which involves the primary, secondary and teritiary structure analysis.
basic techniques which play an important role in the prediction of protien structure include homology based prediction,protien threading and denova methods.
other applications involve
analysis of mutations in cancer genes:
In cancer, the genomes of affected cells are rearranged in complex or even unpredictable ways. Massive sequencing efforts are used to identify previously unknown point mutations in a variety of genes in cancer. Bioinformaticians continue to produce specialized automated systems to manage the sheer volume of sequence data produced, and they create new algorithms and software to compare the sequencing results to the growing collection of human genome sequences and germline polymorphisms. New physical detection technology are employed, such as oligonucleotide microarrays to identify chromosomal gains and losses (called comparative genomic hybridization), and single nucleotide polymorphism arrays to detect known point mutations.
modelling biological sysytems
Systems biology involves the use of computer simulations of cellular subsystems (such as the networks of metabolites and enzymes which comprise metabolism, signal transduction pathways and gene regulatory networks) to both analyze and visualize the complex connections of these cellular processes. Artificial life or virtual evolution attempts to understand evolutionary processes via the computer simulation of simple (artificial) life forms.
highthrough put image analysis
Computational technologies are used to accelerate or fully automate the processing, quantification and analysis of large amounts of high-information-content biomedical imagery. Modern image analysis systems augment an observer’s ability to make measurements from a large or complex set of images, by improving accuracy, objectivity, or speed.
protien-protien docking
protein three-dimensional structures have been determined by X-ray crystallography and Protein nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (protein NMR). One central question for the biological scientist is whether it is practical to predict possible protein-protein interactions only based on these 3D shapes, without doing protein-protein interaction experiments. A variety of methods have been developed to tackle the Protein-protein docking problem, though it seems that there is still much work to be done in this field.
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