What+is+bioinformatics?

[|Bioinformatics Lesson 1]

The website that is linked in the title gives an overview of what bioinformatics is. I found the above slide that begins the presentation to be remarkable. The fact that Biotechnological thoughts have existed for over 8000 years is remarkable from mankind. The lesson then goes on to talk about the history and birth of bioinformatics and technology Unlike biology and chemistry, bioinformatics is in its infancy, just getting its feet off the ground. There have many grateful advances in biotechnology since its modern use in the 1900 when genetics was born. In the last century, so many species have been sequenced and the GenBank continues to sequence millions of genes a day compared to in the early 1960s when genes were sequenced for graduate papers. But we must also remember that many millions of dollars have been spent and nothing has been accomplished. There are still many struggles in the field, but again it is just its infancy.

The first issue the lesson talked about was that there has been an explosion of data over the past 20 years. Many companies have improved technology to sequence genes daily and the cooperation of many companies is lacking leading to miscommunication and duplication of data. Which leads to the second problem, the dis-hegemony of data. With so many ways to analyze data, there are many formats, some of which are not accessible by all.

It then goes on to talk about the different ways to analysis data. It mentions gel electorphoresis, which I was able to perform. You run the DNA through a gel and use a restriction enzyme to code the DNA as it spreads and you use a ladder to analysis it by bps (base pairs). Another form it talked of was the use of DNA sequencing which I am studying. DNA sequencing uses florescent proteins to bind to the nucleotides which is then smeared based on intensity and the program guesses the right base pair based on the protein. And then it talked about Macroarray Analysis which takes DNA washes it over a plate with a set of known genes attached and those with compliments will "hybridize" to the plate and the known genes will be seen. For microarray analysis, which resembles macroarray, DNA is washed over a very dense plate of known genes and the DNA is radio-labeled so the intensity of the DNA is shown in the finished plate. Then there is a type of macroarray analysis that is used for protein analysis which helps to find antibody response to different diseases. And yet another form is mass spectrometry which is also a bioinformatics tool in MATLAB. It can be used to spot proteins and also other expressed genes and DNA.

And then it touched on problem number three; Knowledge Discovery. It is hard to overcome everywhere repetition of experiments. The number of databases are incredible and to keep progressing without overlap will be a challenge. And another important reason for the replication of data is because in order to get a full understanding of the whole genome, we need data from each step and process but sometimes the technologies overlap and create duplicate data.

It then touched on why we need bioinformatics. Well basically because it is the evolution of biology. It takes our amazing advancements in technology to be used in the biological studies while also allowing both computer science and mathematics to enter the scene.

The lesson finishes talking about VIBE. which is a similar bioinformatic program similar to MATLAB. But instead VIBE is JAVA based whereas MATLAB is not.