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Bioinformatics: Major Research Areas

Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field that uses computer science, mathematics and engineering to analyze and organize biological data. It plays an important role in areas like genetics, genomics, proteomics and systems biology by developing tools to store, compare and understand large amounts of biological data like DNA, RNA and protein sequences. Some key applications include genome sequencing and assembly, sequence alignment and comparison, gene prediction and annotation, and modeling molecular structures and interactions.

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Hanumant Suryawanshi
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46 views

Bioinformatics: Major Research Areas

Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field that uses computer science, mathematics and engineering to analyze and organize biological data. It plays an important role in areas like genetics, genomics, proteomics and systems biology by developing tools to store, compare and understand large amounts of biological data like DNA, RNA and protein sequences. Some key applications include genome sequencing and assembly, sequence alignment and comparison, gene prediction and annotation, and modeling molecular structures and interactions.

Uploaded by

Hanumant Suryawanshi
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field that develops and improves on methods for storing, retrieving, organizing and analyzing biological data. A major activity in bioinformatics is to develop software tools to generate useful biological knowledge. Bioinformatics uses many areas of computer science, mathematics and engineering to process biological data. Complex machines are used to read in biological data at a much faster rate than before. Databases and information systems are used to store and organize biological data. Analyzing biological data may involve algorithms in artificial intelligence, soft computing, data mining, image processing, and simulation. The algorithms in turn depend on theoretical foundations such as discrete mathematics, control theory, system theory, information theory, and statistics. Commonly used software tools and technologies in the field include Java, C#, XML, Perl, C, C++, Python, R, SQL, CUDA, MATLAB, and spreadsheet applications.

Major research areas


Bioinformatics has become an important part of many areas of biology. In experimental molecular biology, bioinformatics techniques such as image and signal processing allow extraction of useful results from large amounts of raw data. In the field of genetics and genomics, it aids in sequencing and annotating genomes and their observed mutations. It plays a role in the textual mining of biological literature and the development of biological and gene ontologies to organize and query biological data. It plays a role in the analysis of gene and protein expression and regulation. Bioinformatics tools aid in the comparison of genetic and genomic data and more generally in the understanding of evolutionary aspects of molecular biology. At a more integrative level, it helps analyze and catalogue the biological pathways and networks that are an important part of systems biology. In structural biology, it aids in the simulation and modeling of DNA, RNA, and protein structures as well as molecular interactions.

Sequence analysis
Since the Phage -X174 was sequenced in 1977, the DNA sequences of thousands of organisms have been decoded and stored in databases. This sequence information is analyzed to determine genes that encode polypeptides (proteins), RNA genes, regulatory sequences, structural motifs, and repetitive sequences. A comparison of genes within a species or between different species can show similarities between protein functions, or relations between species (the use of molecular systematics to construct phylogenetic trees). With the growing amount of data, it long ago became impractical to analyze DNA sequences manually. Today, computer programs such as BLAST are used daily to search sequences from more than 260 000 organisms, containing over 190 billion nucleotides.[11] These programs can compensate for mutations (exchanged, deleted or inserted bases) in the DNA sequence, to identify sequences that are related, but not identical. A variant of this sequence alignment is used in the sequencing process itself. The so-called shotgun sequencing technique (which was used, for example, by The

Institute for Genomic Research to sequence the first bacterial genome, Haemophilus influenzae) does not produce entire chromosomes. Instead it generates the sequences of many thousands of small DNA fragments (ranging from 35 to 900 nucleotides long, depending on the sequencing technology). The ends of these fragments overlap and, when aligned properly by a genome assembly program, can be used to reconstruct the complete genome. Shotgun sequencing yields sequence data quickly, but the task of assembling the fragments can be quite complicated for larger genomes. For a genome as large as the human genome, it may take many days of CPU time on large-memory, multiprocessor computers to assemble the fragments, and the resulting assembly will usually contain numerous gaps that have to be filled in later. Shotgun sequencing is the method of choice for virtually all genomes sequenced today, and genome assembly algorithms are a critical area of bioinformatics research. Another aspect of bioinformatics in sequence analysis is annotation. This involves computational gene finding to search for protein-coding genes, RNA genes, and other functional sequences within a genome. Not all of the nucleotides within a genome are part of genes. Within the genomes of higher organisms, large parts of the DNA do not serve any obvious purpose. This socalled junk DNA may, however, contain unrecognized functional elements. Bioinformatics helps to bridge the gap between genome and proteome projects for example, in the use of DNA sequences for protein identification.

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