Bioinformatics and NGS
- [Harvard University]
- Overview
Geneticists use computers to collect, store, manipulate and analyze data. Molecular genetic data are particularly suitable for computer analysis because they come in the form of sequences, such as those of DNA, RNA, or proteins. The ability of computers to analyze data at millions or even billions of operations per second makes it possible to solve problems with genetic information that were considered intractable just a few decades ago. In recent years, the combination of genetics and computational tools has given birth to an important branch of science, bioinformatics.
Bioinformatics is a subdiscipline of biology and computer science that deals with the acquisition, storage, analysis, and dissemination of biological data, usually DNA and amino acid sequences. Bioinformatics uses computer programs for a variety of applications, including determining gene and protein function, establishing evolutionary relationships, and predicting the three-dimensional shape of proteins.
Bioinformatics is the field of computational science related to the analysis of biomolecular sequences. It usually refers to genes, DNA, RNA, or proteins, and is especially useful for comparing genes and other sequences in proteins and other sequences within or between organisms, observing evolutionary relationships between organisms, and exploiting differences between DNA and protein sequences. Patterns exist to determine what their function is. You can think of bioinformatics as essentially the linguistic part of genetics. That is, people in linguistics are studying the patterns of language, which is what people in bioinformatics do - looking for patterns in DNA or protein sequences.
- Genomics and Genetics
Genomics is the study of all or part of the genetic or epigenetic sequence information of an organism and attempts to understand the structure and function of these sequences and their downstream biological products. Health genomics studies molecular mechanisms and the interplay between this molecular information and environmental factors in health interventions and disease.
Human genomics is not the only segment of genomics relevant to human health. The human genome interacts with the genomes of countless other organisms, including plants, vectors and pathogens. Genomics concerns all living organisms and is relevant to human public health. In addition to genomic knowledge, we also consider technologies that exploit genomic knowledge.
Genomics is different from genetics. Genetics is the study of heredity while genomics is defined as the study of genes and their functions and related technologies. The key difference between genomics and genetics is that genetics studies the function and composition of individual genes whereas genomics studies all genes and their interrelationships to determine their combined effect on the growth and development of an organism.
- Bioinformatics and Genomics
Less than 20 years into the era of genomics in healthcare, our understanding of the link between DNA and human health continues to explode, from the genetic basis of disease to how genetics can be used to determine the best treatment for each individual. Ultimately, genomics will change the way we understand health and make most health decisions, from pregnancy to newborn health to childhood diseases, cancer treatment, and more.
Bioinformatics systems engineering is generating new knowledge for patient diagnosis and treatment as well as for animal and plant sciences. Genetic modification has the potential to impact the future of global drug delivery.
Bioinformatics is the field of computational science related to the analysis of biomolecular sequences. It generally refers to genes, DNA, RNA, or proteins, and is particularly useful for comparing genes and other sequences in proteins and other sequences within or between organisms, observing evolutionary relationships between organisms, and using patterns and protein sequences to find out the relationship between them. function is. You can think of bioinformatics as essentially the linguistic part of genetics. That is, people in linguistics are studying the patterns of language, which is what people in bioinformatics do - looking for patterns in DNA or protein sequences.
- Bioinformatics and Big Data
Bioinformatics helps scientists analyze large amounts of data faster and more accurately than ever before, sometimes allowing professionals to work with datasets that were previously too large to handle. The future of biology will involve bioinformatics and big data.
Working with large datasets using machine learning, algorithms, visualization methods, and new software and database technologies requires a solid understanding of bioinformatics. Given the vast amount of biological data now available, it is rapidly becoming a necessary skill developed by scientists to achieve biological breakthroughs.
- Bioinformatics is Expanding Our Understanding of Genomes
The need to organize and analyze large amounts of sequence data from genome projects has led to the development of bioinformatics, the application of computational methods to the storage and analysis of biological data. Research laboratories, private companies, and government-funded institutions maintain databases and provide software that scientists can use to analyze sequence data. For example, the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) maintains a website with many tools for accessing its sequence database, GenBank. As of 2016, GenBank contains over 200 billion base pairs! GenBank is continuously updated and freely available over the Internet, and the amount of data it contains is estimated to double approximately every 18 months.
A software program called BLAST on the NCBI website allows users to compare DNA sequences base-by-base to every sequence in GenBank. Researchers studying genes may look for similar regions in other genes of the same species or in genes of other species. Another program can compare collections of DNA sequences from different species and draw them in the form of an evolutionary tree based on sequence relationships.
Success in the field of genomics has encouraged scientists to begin a similar systematic study of the entire set of proteins encoded by the genome (the proteome), an approach known as proteomics. Because proteins, not genes, actually perform most of a cell's activities, scientists must study when and where proteins are produced in an organism and how those proteins interact to understand how cells and organisms function. One of biology's overarching themes - how interactions affect biological systems - can now be studied at the genetic level. Given the sheer number of proteins and the many ways in which their production can be controlled, assembling and analyzing proteomes presents many experimental challenges. Continued progress is beginning to provide the tools to meet these challenges.
[More to come ...]
