Introduction to Bioinformatics Prologue. Bioinformatics Living things have the ability to store,...
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Transcript of Introduction to Bioinformatics Prologue. Bioinformatics Living things have the ability to store,...
Introduction to Bioinformatics
Prologue
Bioinformatics
• Living things have the ability to store, utilize, and pass on information
• Bioinformatics strives to – determine what information is biologically
important– decipher how it is used to precisely control the
chemical environment within living organisms
What is Bioinformatics
• The combination of
Biology and Informatics
• The use of computational tools to organize and analyze genetic and protein sequence data – First coined by
Dr. Hwa Lim in 1988 OR
Dr. Paulien Hogeweg in the seventies ??
Definition of Bioinformatics
• NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) – “Bioinformatics is the field of science in which
biology, computer science, and information technology merge to form a single discipline.”
– “The ultimate goal of the field is to enable the discovery of new biological insights as well as to create a global perspective from which unifying principles in biology can be discerned.”
The quotations on this and next slides are from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/About/primer/bioinformatics.html.
Why Informatics
What Informatics Can Do
• Development of new algorithms and statistics– Assess relationships among members of large data
sets• Analysis and interpretation of various types of
data– Such as nucleotide and amino acid sequences,
protein structures, and gene expression• Development and implementation of tools
– Enable efficient access and management of different types of information
The Course
• IS NOT– a Biology course – but Biology will be covered– to teach you to become an expert Perl programmer –
although we will use Perl for programming assignments
– a tool class – albeit tools will be introduced and studied, and used for our labs
• IS – a CS course to study bioinformatics from computer
science’s perspective – to show you how algorithms, data structures, math,
and software development are applied to solving biological problems
The Course
• Goals– To study fundamental concepts of bioinformatics from
computer science’s perspective– To become knowledgeable in this field
• Work / communicate with bioinformaticians / scientists• Starting point to become a bioinformatician• Read articles in this field
– To have fun
• If you are serious– Learn more biochemistry and molecular biology– Learn more CS / math / statistics– Communicate/work with people in this field
The Instructor
• Fond of math, but not good at biology at high school
• Computer scientist by training
• Bioinformatics educator by being curious first, then followed by interest and self-learning
Future: 50 or 500 Years?
• “Biology has at least 50 more interesting years.” James D. Watson, Nobel laureate, December 31, 1984
• “Biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on, …” Donald Knuth, in Computer Literacy Interview by Dan Doernberg, December 7th, 1993