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A quick introduction
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| [in short] |
"Bioinformatics - the development and application of computational methods to acquire, store, organize, archive and visualize biological data - is one of the fastest-growing technologies." [1] |
| [definition] |
"Bioinformatics is the field of science in which biology, computer science, and information technology merge to form a single discipline. The ultimate goal of the field is to enable the discovery of new biological insights as well as to create a global perspective from which unifying principles in biology can be discerned" [2] |
| [definition] |
"Bioinformatics is the application of computer technology to the management and analysis of biological data. The result is that computers are being used to gather, store, analyse and merge biological data." [8] |
| [definition] |
"Bioinformatics is conceptualising biology in terms of molecules and applying informatics techniques (derived from disciplines such as applied maths, computer science and statistics) to understand and organise the information associated with these molecules, on a large scale. In short, bioinformatics is a management information system for molecular biology and has many practical applications." [3] |
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| [some typical applications] |
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Sequence analysis, gene prediction
One of the oldest areas where bioinformatics developed into a science of its own was the task to analyze the information encoded in our own genes.
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Other data analysis
All experiments need (and should get) computational support at some point. From a few calculations in an excel file to trained classifying methods used in the field of data mining, there are various ways to get a better understanding of the experimetal data.
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Pathway reconstruction, systems biology
The analysis of various types of experiments hopefully leads to insights into the underlying biological mechanisms. The discovery of how the individiual parts (molecules or other entities) act together in a coordinated network is one of the most exciting areas of research.
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Data management and integration
How can the large amounts of data be handled, that e.g. hight-throughput experiments or the sequencing of the human genome produce?
Databases have been developed that either specialize in a very specific type of data (eg. promotor regions) or try to integrate various other sources in a summarizing meta-database.
Various technologies and formats have been developed to allow the interchange and integration of data. The Distributed Annotation System (DAS) is one of the protocols that can be used to exchange and display this type of data. It is easy to set up your own server using eg. the Proserver (Perl) to stream data from a GFF file or a database. The main BioDas page gives all the general details.
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| [further readings & sources] |
- M. Chicurel Bioinformatics: Bringing it all together Nature 419, 751-757
- National Center for Biotechnology Information, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
- N.M. Luscombe, D. Greenbaum, M. Gerstein What is Bioinformatics? A proposed Definition and Overview of the Field Method.Inform.Med. 4/2001
- Bioinformatics in the Classroom
- In-depth statistics from the makers of MathLab
- Bioinformatics course from the Max-Planck institute in Berlin
- European Bioinformatics Institute: Very nice Introduction
- BioPlanet website: Links, Jobs, and more
- Bioinformatics education PLoS Collection
- Computational Biology Primers Nature Biotechnology
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