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Bioinformatics or computational biology is the use of mathematical and informational techniques, including statistics, to solve biological problems, usually by creating or using computer programs, mathematical models or both. One of the main areas of bioinformatics is the data mining and analysis of the data gathered by the various genome projects. Other areas are sequence alignment, protein structure prediction, systems biology, protein-protein interactions and virtual evolution.As a summary, the various genome projects produce many long lists of letters and one of the roles of bioinformatics is to attempt to determine the words, grammar, sentences and ultimately, meaning (functional significance) of those letters. There are many who hope that developments in this field will ultimately help in the discoveries of cures for various diseases including cancer.
1 Sequence analysis
Main articles: Sequence alignment, Sequence database
Since the Epstein-Barr virusThe Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), also called Human herpesvirus 4 (HHV-4), is a virus of the herpes family (which includes Herpes simplex virus and Cytomegalovirus , and one of the most common viruses in humans. Most people become infected with EBV, which is was sequencedFor the sense of "sequencing" used in electronic music, see the music sequencer article. In genetics and biochemistry, sequencing means to determine the primary structure (or primary sequence) of an unbranched biopolymer. Sequencing results in a symbolic in 1984This page is about the year 1984. For other uses of 1984, see 1984 (disambiguation). 1984 is a leap year starting on Sunday (link shows calendar). Events January January 1 Brunei becomes a fully independent state January 1 AT&T is broken up into 22 indepe, the DNA sequenceA DNA sequence (sometimes genetic sequence is a succession of letters representing the primary structure of a real or hypothetical DNA molecule or strand, The possible letters are A C G and T representing the four nucleotide subunits of a DNA strand ( ade of more and more organisms is stored in electronic databases. These data are analyzed to determine genes that code for proteinmyoglobin, showing coloured alpha helices. This protein was the first to have its structure solved by X-ray crystallography by Max Perutz and Sir John Cowdery Kendrew in 1958, which led to them receiving a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. A protein is a complex,s, as well as regulatory sequences. A comparison of genes within a speciesThis article discusses biological species. Also see combinatorial species for the mathematical meaning of the term. Species is also a movie by Roger Donaldson. In English "species" is both singular and plural. The word " specie" is unrelated and is used t or between different species can show similarities between protein functions, or relations between species (the use of molecular systematicsMolecular systematics is a product of the traditional field of systematics and the growing field of bioinformatics. It is the process of using data on the molecular constitution of biological organisms' DNA, RNA, or both, in order to resolve questions in to construct phylogenetic treeA phylogenetic tree is a tree showing the evolutionary interrelationships among various species or other entities that are believed to have a common ancestor. A phylogenetic tree is a form of a cladogram. In a phylogenetic tree, each node with descendantss). With the growing amount of data, it becomes impossible to analyze DNA sequences manually. Today, computer programs are used to find similar sequences in the genome of dozens of organisms, within billions of nucleotides. These programs can compensate for mutations (exchanged, deleted or inserted bases) in the DNA sequence, in order 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 (that was used, for example, by Celera Genomics to sequence the human genome) does not give a sequential list of nucleotides, but instead the sequences of thousands of small DNA fragments (each about 600 nucleotides long). The ends of these fragments overlap and, aligned in the right way, make up the complete genome. Shotgun sequencing yields sequence data quickly, but the task to re-align the fragments can be quite complicated for larger genomes. In the case of the Human Genome Project, it took several months on a supercomputer array to align them correctly. Shotgun sequencing is generally preferred for smaller genomes, such as bacteria, and often used at least partially on organisms with much larger genomes.
Another aspect of bioinformatics in sequence analysis is the automatic search for genes and regulatory sequences within a genome. Not all of the nucleotides within a genome are genes. Within the genome of higher organisms, large parts of the DNA do not serve any obvious purpose. This so-called 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 sequence for protein identification.
