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Bioinformatics Software

BS-Botany 3rd(M)

Name: Mudassar Iqbal Subject: Introduction to Computer Roll No: 1047 University of Education Okara Campus

INTRODUCTION Bioinformatics  is an interdisciplinary

field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combines computer science, statistics, mathematics and engineering to study and process biological data.

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Why we study it?

You may noticed that about 10 of your fellow bloggers are part of my bioinformatics buddies circle. We come from all over the place with undergrads in computer science, statistics and all fields of biology. We like to think of bioinformatics as the intersection of these fields. And between us we are doing all sorts of different things.Many of us (myself included) study DNA. We sequence genomes, or bits of genomes and try to work out what makes humans, mice, bacteria etc. tick. Now the human genome for example has around 23,000 genes spread over 3.2 billion DNA bases. If you count the DNA that you inherit from both your mother and father you have almost as much DNA in one cell as there are humans on the entire planet! We bioinformaticians end up with so much data that we need big-ass super computers and fancy statistics to make sense of it all.

Relation to other fields

Bioinformatics is a similar but distinct science from biological computation and computational biology. Biological computation uses bioengineering and biology to build biological computers, whereas bioinformatics uses computation to better understand biology. Bioinformatics and computational biology have similar aims and approaches, but differ in scale: bioinformatics organizes and analyzes basic biological data, whereas computational biology builds theoretical models of biological systems, just as mathematical biology does with mathematical models.

Goals

In order to study how normal cellular activities are altered in different disease states, the biological data must be combined to form a comprehensive picture of these activities. Therefore, the field of bioinformatics has evolved such that the most pressing task now involves the analysis and interpretation of various types of data. This includes 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:

the development and implementation of computer programs that enable efficient access to, use and management of, various types of information.

the development of new algorithms (mathematical formulas) and statistical measures with which to assess relationships among members of large data sets. For example, there are methods to locate a gene within a sequence, to predict protein structure and/or function, and to cluster protein sequences into families of related sequences.

Conclusion

With the confluence of biology and computer science, the computer applications of molecular biology are drawing a greater attention among the life science researchers and scientists these days. As it becomes imperative for biologists to seek the help of information technology professionals to accomplish the ever growing computational requirements of a host of exciting and needy biological problems, the synergy between modern biology and computer science is to blossom in the days to come. Thus the research scope for all the mathematical techniques and algorithms coupled with software programming languages, software development and deployment tools are to get a real boost. In addition, information technologies such as databases, middleware, graphical user interface(GUI) design, distributed object computing, storage area networks (SAN), data compression, network and communication and remote management are all set to play a very critical role in taking forward the goals for which the Bioinformatics field came into existence.

Reference: Wikipedia