Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics is the combination of biology and information technology. It is the branch which deals with the computer based analysis of large biological data sets.

_source

Computers are used to store analyze and integrate biological and genetic information which can then be applied to gene based drug discovery and development. The need for bioinformatics capable has been participated by the explosion of publicly available genomic information resulting from the human genome project. The goal of this project was the determination of the sequence human genome.

In the last few decades advanced in molecular biology and the equipment available for researches in the field have allowed increasingly rapid sequencing of large portion of the genomes of several species to date a number of bacterial genomes, a genome of simple eukaryotes (S.cereviceae ) & more complex animals have been sequenced. The human genome project has been design to sequence all 23 base pairs of human chromosomes.

_source

Popular sequence database such as Gen bank , DDBJ , EMBL have been growing at exponential rates computers and information science has been applied for this mass of biological data to produce what is often called the field of bioinformatics or computerize molecular biology .Bioinformatics is needed to handle the enamors data being generated by researches identify the long DNA sequence of human , plant , animals and microorganisms and other biological data DNA and protein sequence are particularly amenable to computer analysis ,since they can be represent by the string of letters which computers are very apt to deal with a DNA sequence is a string of 4 letters ( A,G,C,T ) where as protein sequence can be represented by a string of 20 letters each of which represent and amino acid.

_source

Biological databases

A biological databases is a collection of both experimental and theoretical data that is organized that so that its contents can be easily accessed , managed, update and retrieved.
Biological databases are mainly divided into three categories.

1. Primary Database
2. Secondary Database
3. Specialized Database

Primary database :

It contains original biological data. They are repositories of a raw sequence data and can be freely accessed all over the world on the world wide web. Gen bank , European molecular biology laboratory (EMBL) , DNA bank of Japan (DDBJ), which are nucleotide sequence database freely available on the internet.

Links are given below.

_{Gene bank
European molecular biology laboratory (EMBL)
DNA bank of Japan}

Secondary Database :

Secondary databases contain computationally processed, annotated sequences (protein ) and manually curated information , based on original information from primary database.
Eg : Protein sequence database , protein structure database.
_{Protein sequence database}

Specialized database:

Specialized database normally serve a specific research community of focus on a particular organism. The content of these database databases maybe sequence or other type of information.

Thank You!
@dilshan96