Notes - Week 1

Notes

• Bioinformatics is the field of science in which biology, computer science, and informational technology meet.
• Bioinformatics deals with the application of computers to the collection and analysis of biologic data to solve biological problems.
• Bioinformatics has become popular due to the demand for means of storing and managing complex biological data sets.
• The goal of bioinformatics is to find new discoveries in the biological field.
• Common uses of bioinformatics are the analysis of amino acid sequences, protein domains, protein structures, and nucleotide.
• Bioinformatics started with Gregor Mendel and a need to record a vast amount of genetic traits that he collected in his experiment.
• Electrophoresis is a technique that separates macromolecules based on size.
• A famous project is the Human Genome Project that fueled bioinformatics by creating a need for databases.
• Development of computational algorithms that help us understand biological processes. The goal is to improve sectors such as agriculture where it can be used, for example, to increase the nutritional content of crops.
• Bioinformaticians use computational tools and systems to answer problems of biology. Computational biologists develop theories, algorithms, and techniques for the tools bioinformaticians use.
• Biological databases are data bases of sequence data from genome sequences from various projects. It helps explain biological phenomena and assists in fighting diseases and creating medications.
• NCBI is the National Center for Biotechnology Information and is the premier website for biomedical research and can be divided into many sub databases.
• Genbank sequence is a collection of all public nuecliatoid sequences and protein translation.
• Bioinformatics is using java in a computer programing form.
• Common tasks include string manipulation and file parsing.
• Biodiversity Databases collect a wide variety of information on a wide range of species. Computer simulations, with this information, simulates, for example, population dynamic.
• The most well known application of Bioinformatics is sequence analysis.
• Shotgun sequencing is easy and quick and compare known sequences of a genome to specific mutations.
• Blast searches Genomes of organisms and uses dynamic programing.
• FASTA is used to represent either nucleated sequences or peptide sequences.
• Homology modeling is predicting the structure of a protein once the structure of a homologous protein is known.
• Sequencing of plant and animal genomes can improve the quality of crops and livestock.