Friday, 15 July 2011

A breif glance about "BIOINFORMATICS AND COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY"

A relative new need of looking towards the field of biology and a term coined by the great Paulien Hogeweg and Ben Hesper in 1978 gave the world first looks of the subject.


In present time with rapid development of  computer science, bioinformatics has 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.To be more specific in the never ending field of genome and protein sequencing.

Common activities in bioinformatics also include mapping and analyzing DNA and protein sequences, aligning different DNA and protein sequences to compare them and creating 3-D models of protein structures.

Important sub-disciplines within bioinformatics and computational biology also includes the development and implementation of tools that enable efficient access and use of various types of information and the development of new algorithms (mathematical formulas) and statistics with which its helpful to access the 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.

 

Major research areas in bioinformatics and computational biology 

1) Sequence analysis

2) Genome annotation

3) Computational evolutionary biology 

4) Analysis of gene expression

5) Analysis of protein expression

6) Analysis of mutations

7) Modeling biological systems

8) Prediction of protein structure

9) Molecular Interaction 

10) Docking algorithms

At the end it can be said that bioinformatics in just a few decades of its evolution has become a very important tool in the hands of scientist for determining the complex world of life science.

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