Bioinformatics
Bioinformatics is the use of mathematical, statistical and computer methods to analyze biological, biochemical, and biophysical data. Because bioinformatics is a young, rapidly evolving field, however, it also has a number of other credible definitions. It can also be defined as the science and technology of learning, managing, and processing biological information. Bioinformatics is often focused on obtaining biologically oriented data, organizing this information into databases, developing methods to get useful information from such databases, and devising methods to integrate related data from disparate sources. The computer databases and algorithms are developed to speed up and enhance biological research.
Bioinformatics can help answer such questions as whether a newly analyzed gene is similar to any previously known gene, whether a protein's sequence can suggest how the protein functions, and whether the genes turned on in a cancer cell are different from those turned on in a healthy cell.
Databases and Analysis Programs
A good deal of the early work in bioinformatics focused on processing and analyzing gene and protein sequences catalogued in databases such as GenBank, EMBL, and SWISS-PROT. Such databases were developed in academia or by government-sponsored groups and served as repositories where scientists could store and share their sequence data with other researchers.
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