Bioinformatics
Module - 3
Introduction
• Bioinformatics is an emerging branch of biological science
that emerged from the combination of both biology and
information technology.
• It is an interdisciplinary field of study that uses Biology,
Chemistry, Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science that
have merged to form a single discipline.
• This sector is mainly involved in analysing biological data, and
developing new software using biological tools.
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Bioinformatics is a data management and manipulation method
for
• molecular biology
• biochemistry
• health sector
• environmental biology
• agriculture
• addressing the storage of data sets
• data mining and processing
• structural and functional annotations of gene and protein
• system modelling
• drugs discovery
Concept behind bioinformatics, in silico biology, and computational
biology
• “Decoding problems arising in the field of biological sciences via computation” is
known as bioinformatics
• It handles biological data obtained through several experimental techniques for
their documentation in the form of databases for further availability to the
scientific community
• This dataset is analyzed for dissecting the complexity of biological systems, and
acquired knowledge accelerates research activity and helps scientists to get
fruitful results and novel insight
• The term “in silico biology ” is concerned with bioinformatics. Performing any
work using a computer for biology is known as in silico biology, for example,
retrieval of biological sequences from databases.
• In Computational biology we are talking about the development of algorithms
and theoretical methods for solving biological problems. These developed
algorithms and methods are further utilized in the design and development of
biological software or tools that help in analyzing biological data using the
computer to create knowledge, that is, bioinformatics
Scientific discipline and support systems for
bioinformatics
Needs of bioinformatics
• Due to advances in several omics platforms- have produced big data in biology
related to genomes, transcriptomes, genotyping by sequencing, proteome,
metabolome, etc.
• The management and analysis of these high throughput data need
bioinformatics.
• There is a need to develop specific databases for their documentation.
• These datasets will help in improving the accuracy of available tools and enable
scientists to train data for the development of new tools via machine and deep
learning approaches.
Aim of bioinformatics
• Documentation of useful information about medicinal plants available in
literature/public domains in the form of a database.
• Documentation of available information about plants and animal genetic
resources.
• Development of useful organism/species -based databases for the
documentation of omics data.
• Improvement of the contents and usefulness of already developed/available
databases.
• Development of better and fast graphical user interface (GUI)-based tools for
data integration and analysis.
• Improvement of available tool/software for biologist/wet lab
scientists/noncomputer background scientists for their effortless use.
• Development of platform-independent software’s for the computational analysis
of biological data.
Recent Development in the field of Bio
informatics
• AI plays a key role in advancing biomedical research.
• In particular, the field of bioinformatics, which involves the collection and
interpretation of biological data using software tools, is undergoing a
period of rapid transformation and growth due to innovative uses of AI.
• Recent AI-related developments in bioinformatics include the
determination of 3D shapes of proteins, the identification of
disease-specific biomarkers, and the modification of existing drugs to
create COVID-19 therapeutics.
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• DNA- bioinformatics has developed and contributed to the growth of research
projects associated with high throughput DNA sequencing and other fields of
biology.
• Its ultimate aim is to visualize the wealth of biological knowledge hidden in
sequences, structures, literature, and other big data of biology
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• The use of computational tools becomes necessary for the investigation of useful
information from large sets of biological data.
• The analysis of these data required good bioinformatics skills and most biologists
are not familiar with command -line tools, bioinformatics analysis, and
interpretation.
• Therefore much collaboration has been established among experimental
biologists and bioinformatics groups to make their data meaningful.
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• Now in recent years, several GUI -based software platforms have been developed
that can easily understandable for biologists to integrate and an analyze high
-throughput omics data.
• Bioinformatics has evolved into a full stream of multiple opportunities for
researchers from different areas, such as medicine, biotechnology, plant
breeding, chemistry, statistics, mathematics, computer sciences, and IT.
• The main motto of this field is to turn data into knowledge through computation.
Challenges in bioinformatics
• Design of small drug-like molecule,
• Development of a quantitative model for signal transduction pathway,
• Accurate prediction of protein secondary and tertiary structure using amino
acid sequence,
• Understanding the evolution of protein,
• Understanding the speciation event,
• Understanding gene ontology,
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• Besides, there are many challenges faced by computer scientists
working in the area of bioinformatics, such as:
• Management of big data in biology
• Information management
• Improve the accuracy of software
• Programmability
Application of Bioinformatics
• Sequence Analysis
• Phylogenetic analysis
• Prediction of protein secondary structure
• Protein 3D structure prediction
• Evaluation and validation of predicted protein model
• Discovery and designing of small molecules leading to drugs/agrochemical development
• Next -generation sequencing data analysis
• Pharmacogenomics
• Systems biology and omics data integration