Essay on the Importance of Bioinformatics in Genomics !
Bioinformatics is the study of biological information as it passes from its storage site in the genome to the various gene products in the cell. Generally speaking, bioinformatics involves the creation and development of advanced information and computational technologies for problems in molecular biology.
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As such, it deals with methods for storing, retrieving and analyzing biological data, such as nucleic acid (DNA/RNA) and protein sequences, structures, functions, pathways and interactions. It is a discipline encompassing both maths and biology.
Bioinformatics as a field of study is becoming increasingly important due to the interest of the pharmaceutical industry in genome sequencing projects, which comprise a key segment of the discipline.
There is a vital need to harness this information for medical diagnostic and therapeutic uses, and there are opportunities for other industrial applications.
Bioinformatics has emerged as a multidisciplinary subject that encompasses developments in information and computer technology as applied to biotechnology and biological sciences.
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Bioinformatics uses computer software tools for database creation, data management, data warehousing (storing massive amounts of data in an orderly way), data mining (trying to retrieve useful data from the stored data) and global communication network.
Functional genomics, biomolecular structure, proteome analysis, cell metabolism, biodiversity, downstream processing in chemical engineering, drug design, vaccine design are some of the areas in which bioinformatics has become an integral part of research and development.
The most pressing tasks in bioinformatics involve the analysis of sequence information. Computational Biology is the name given to this process, and it involves the following:
i. Finding the genes in the DNA sequences of various organisms
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ii. Developing methods to predict the structure and/or function of newly discovered proteins and structural RNA sequences.
iii. Clustering protein sequences into families of related sequences and the development of protein models.
iv. Aligning similar proteins and generating phylogenetic trees to examine evolutionary relationships.