Applications of Bioinformatics in Genomics and Proteomics

Abstract

Bioinformatics is the application of statistics and computer science to the field of molecular biology. The term bioinformatics was coined by Paulien Hogeweg in 1979 for the study of bioinformatics processes in biotic systems. Its primary use since at least the late 1980s has been in genomics and proteomics, particularly in those areas of genomics involving in large-scale DNA sequencing and proteomics in protein structure prediction. Bioinformatics now entitle the creation and advancement of data bases, 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 proteomics. Research technologies and developments in information technologies have combined to produce tremendous amount of information related to molecular biology. It is the name given to these mathematical and computing approaches used to clear 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. Bioinformatics is focus on developing and applying computationally intensive techniques (e.g., 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.