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Bioinformatics
Bioinformatics is the application of statistics and computer science to the field of molecular biology. The term bioinformatics was coined by Paulien Hogeweg and Ben Hesper in 1978 for the study of informatic processes in biotic systems[1] . Its primary use since at least the late 1980s has been in genomics and genetics, particularly in those areas of genomics involving large-scale DNA sequencing. Bioinformatics now 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. Over the past few decades rapid developments in genomic and other molecular research technologies and developments in information technologies have combined to produce a tremendous amount of information related to molecular biology. It is the name given to these mathematical and computing approaches used to glean understanding of biological processes. Common activities in bioinformatics include mapping and analyzing DNA and protein sequences, aligning different DNA and protein sequences to compare them and creating and viewing 3-D models of protein structures. The primary goal of bioinformatics is to increase the understanding of biological processes. What sets it apart from other approaches, however, is its focus on developing and applying computationally intensive techniques (e.g., pattern recognition, data mining, machine learning algorithms, and visualization) to achieve this goal. Major research efforts in the field include sequence alignment, gene finding, genome assembly, drug design, drug discovery, protein structure alignment, protein structure prediction, prediction of gene expression and protein-protein interactions, genome-wide association studies and the modeling of evolution.
Introduction
Bioinformatics was applied in the creation and maintenance of a database to store biological information at the beginning of the "genomic revolution", such as nucleotide and amino acid sequences. Development of this type of database involved not only design issues but the development of complex interfaces whereby researchers could both access existing data as well as submit new or revised data. 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, including 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 tools that enable efficient access to, and use and management of, various types of information. the development of new algorithms (mathematical formulas) and statistics with which to assess 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. There are two fundamental ways of modelling a Biological system (e.g. living cell) both coming under Bioinformatic approaches. Static Sequences - Proteins, Nucleic acids and Peptides Structures - Proteins, Nucleic acids, Ligands (including metabolites and drugs) and Peptides Interaction data among the above entities including microarray data and Networks of proteins, metabolites
Bioinformatics Dynamic Systems Biology comes under this category including reaction fluxes and variable concentrations of metabolites Multi-Agent Based modelling approaches capturing cellular events such as signalling, transcription and reaction dynamics A broad sub-category under bioinformatics is structural bioinformatics.
Genome annotation
In the context of genomics, annotation is the process of marking the genes and other biological features in a DNA sequence. The first genome annotation software system was designed in 1995 by Dr. Owen White, who was part of the team at The Institute for Genomic Research that sequenced and analyzed the first genome of a free-living organism to be decoded, the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae. Dr. White built a software system to find the genes (places in the DNA sequence that encode a protein), the transfer RNA, and other features, and to make initial assignments of function to those genes. Most current genome annotation systems work similarly, but the programs available for analysis of genomic DNA are constantly changing and improving.
Bioinformatics
Analysis of regulation
Regulation is the complex orchestration of events starting with an extracellular signal such as a hormone and leading to an increase or decrease in the activity of one or more proteins. Bioinformatics techniques have been applied to explore various steps in this process. For example, promoter analysis involves the identification and study of sequence motifs in the DNA surrounding the coding region of a gene. These motifs influence the extent to which that region is transcribed into mRNA. Expression data can be used to infer gene regulation: one might compare microarray data from a wide variety of states of an organism to form hypotheses about the genes involved in each state. In a single-cell organism, one might compare stages of the cell cycle, along with various stress conditions (heat shock, starvation, etc.). One can then apply clustering algorithms to that expression data to determine which genes are co-expressed. For example, the upstream regions (promoters) of co-expressed genes can be searched for over-represented regulatory elements.
Bioinformatics
Comparative genomics
The core of comparative genome analysis is the establishment of the correspondence between genes (orthology analysis) or other genomic features in different organisms. It is these intergenomic maps that make it possible to trace the evolutionary processes responsible for the divergence of two genomes. A multitude of evolutionary events acting at various organizational levels shape genome evolution. At the lowest level, point mutations affect individual nucleotides. At a higher level, large chromosomal segments undergo duplication, lateral transfer, inversion, transposition, deletion and insertion. Ultimately, whole genomes are involved in processes of hybridization, polyploidization and endosymbiosis, often leading to rapid speciation. The complexity of genome evolution poses many exciting challenges to developers of mathematical models and algorithms, who have recourse to a spectra of algorithmic, statistical and mathematical techniques, ranging from exact, heuristics, fixed parameter and approximation algorithms for problems based on parsimony models to Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms for Bayesian analysis of problems based on probabilistic models. Many of these studies are based on the homology detection and protein families computation.
Bioinformatics clinical image analysis and visualization determining the real-time air-flow patterns in breathing lungs of living animals quantifying occlusion size in real-time imagery from the development of and recovery during arterial injury making behavioral observations from extended video recordings of laboratory animals infrared measurements for metabolic activity determination inferring clone overlaps in DNA mapping, e.g. the Sulston score
Bioinformatics Docking algorithms In the last two decades, tens of thousands of 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.
References
[1] Hogeweg, P. (1978). Simulating the growth of cellular forms. Simulation 31, 90-96; Hogeweg, P. and Hesper, B. (1978) Interactive instruction on population interactions. Comput Biol Med 8:319-27. [2] Sanger F, Air GM, Barrell BG, Brown NL, Coulson AR, Fiddes CA, Hutchison CA, Slocombe PM, Smith M (February 1977). "Nucleotide sequence of bacteriophage phi X174 DNA". Nature 265 (5596): 68795. PMID870828. [3] Benson DA, Karsch-Mizrachi I, Lipman DJ, Ostell J, Wheeler DL (January 2008). "GenBank" (http:/ / www. pubmedcentral. nih. gov/ articlerender. fcgi?tool=pmcentrez& artid=2238942). Nucleic Acids Res. 36 (Database issue): D2530. doi:10.1093/nar/gkm929. PMID18073190. PMC2238942. [4] Fleischmann RD, Adams MD, White O, Clayton RA, Kirkness EF, Kerlavage AR, Bult CJ, Tomb JF, Dougherty BA, Merrick JM (July 1995). "Whole-genome random sequencing and assembly of Haemophilus influenzae Rd". Science 269 (5223): 496512. PMID7542800.
Achuthsankar S Nair Computational Biology & Bioinformatics - A gentle Overview (http://print.achuth. googlepages.com/BINFTutorialV5.0CSI07.pdf), Communications of Computer Society of India, January 2007 Aluru, Srinivas, ed. Handbook of Computational Molecular Biology. Chapman & Hall/Crc, 2006. ISBN 1584884061 (Chapman & Hall/Crc Computer and Information Science Series) Baldi, P and Brunak, S, Bioinformatics: The Machine Learning Approach, 2nd edition. MIT Press, 2001. ISBN 0-262-02506-X Barnes, M.R. and Gray, I.C., eds., Bioinformatics for Geneticists, first edition. Wiley, 2003. ISBN 0-470-84394-2 Baxevanis, A.D. and Ouellette, B.F.F., eds., Bioinformatics: A Practical Guide to the Analysis of Genes and Proteins, third edition. Wiley, 2005. ISBN 0-471-47878-4 Baxevanis, A.D., Petsko, G.A., Stein, L.D., and Stormo, G.D., eds., Current Protocols in Bioinformatics. Wiley, 2007. ISBN 0-471-25093-7 Claverie, J.M. and C. Notredame, Bioinformatics for Dummies. Wiley, 2003. ISBN 0-7645-1696-5 Cristianini, N. and Hahn, M. Introduction to Computational Genomics (http://www.computational-genomics. net/), Cambridge University Press, 2006. (ISBN 9780521671910 | ISBN 0521671914)
Bioinformatics Durbin, R., S. Eddy, A. Krogh and G. Mitchison, Biological sequence analysis. Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-521-62971-3 Gilbert, D. Bioinformatics software resources (http://bib.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/5/3/300). Briefings in Bioinformatics, Briefings in Bioinformatics, 2004 5(3):300-304. Keedwell, E., Intelligent Bioinformatics: The Application of Artificial Intelligence Techniques to Bioinformatics Problems. Wiley, 2005. ISBN 0-470-02175-6 Kohane, et al. Microarrays for an Integrative Genomics. The MIT Press, 2002. ISBN 0-262-11271-X Lund, O. et al. Immunological Bioinformatics. The MIT Press, 2005. ISBN 0-262-12280-4 Michael S. Waterman, Introduction to Computational Biology: Sequences, Maps and Genomes. CRC Press, 1995. ISBN 0-412-99391-0 Mount, David W. Bioinformatics: Sequence and Genome Analysis Spring Harbor Press, May 2002. ISBN 0-87969-608-7 Pachter, Lior and Sturmfels, Bernd. "Algebraic Statistics for Computational Biology" Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-85700-7 Pevzner, Pavel A. Computational Molecular Biology: An Algorithmic Approach The MIT Press, 2000. ISBN 0-262-16197-4 Soinov, L. Bioinformatics and Pattern Recognition Come Together (http://jprr.org/index.php/jprr/article/ view/8/5) Journal of Pattern Recognition Research ( JPRR (http://www.jprr.org)), Vol 1 (1) 2006 p.37-41 Tisdall, James. "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics" O'Reilly, 2001. ISBN 0-596-00080-4 Dedicated issue of Philosophical Transactions B on Bioinformatics freely available (http://publishing. royalsociety.org/bioinformatics) Catalyzing Inquiry at the Interface of Computing and Biology (2005) CSTB report (http://www.nap.edu/ catalog/11480.html) Calculating the Secrets of Life: Contributions of the Mathematical Sciences and computing to Molecular Biology (1995) (http://www.nap.edu/catalog/2121.html) Foundations of Computational and Systems Biology MIT Course (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Biology/ 7-91JSpring2004/LectureNotes/index.htm) Computational Biology: Genomes, Networks, Evolution Free MIT Course (http://compbio.mit.edu/6.047/) Algorithms for Computational Biology Free MIT Course (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/ Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/6-096Spring-2005/CourseHome/index.htm) Zhang, Z., Cheung, K.H. and Townsend, J.P. Bringing Web 2.0 to bioinformatics, Briefing in Bioinformatics. In press (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18842678)
External links
Bioinformatics Organization (http://bioinformatics.org/) Bioinformatics Research Groups (http://www.google.com/Top/Science/Biology/Bioinformatics/ Research_Groups/) - Google Directory EMBnet (http://www.embnet.org/) Open Bioinformatics Foundation (http://www.open-bio.org/)
License
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