The potential of Bioinformatics in the identification of useful genes leading to the development of new gene products, drug discovery and drug development has led to a paradigm shift in biology and biotechnology-these fields are becoming more & more computationally intensive. The new paradigm, now emerging, is that all the genes will be known "in the sense of being resident in database available electronically", and the starting point of biological investigation will be theoretical and a scientist will begin with a theoretical conjecture and only then turning to experiment to follow or test the hypothesis. With a much deep understanding of the biological processes at the molecular level, the Bioinformatics scientist have developed new techniques to analyse genes on an industrial scale resulting in a new area of science known as 'Genomics'.
The shift from gene biology has resulted in the development of strategies-from lab techniques to computer programmes to analyse whole batch of genes at once. Genomics is revolutionizing drug development, gene therapy, and our entire approach to health care and human medicine.
The genomic discoveries are getting translated in to practical biomedical results through Bioinformatics applications. Work on proteomics and genomics will continue using highly sophisticated software tools and data networks that can carry multimedia databases. Thus, the research will be in the development of multimedia databases in various areas of life sciences and biotechnology. There will be an urgent need for development of software tools for datamining, analysis and modelling, and downstream processing. Security of data, data transfer and data compression, auto checks on data accuracy and correctness will also be major research area of bioinformatics. The use of virtual Reality in drug design, metabolic pathway design, and unicellular organism design, paving the way to design and modification of muticellular organisms, will be the challenges challenges which Bioinformatics scientist and specialist have to tackle. It has now been universally recognized that Bioinformatics is the key to the new grand data-intensive molecular biology that will take us into 21 century.
Bioinformatics - Industry Overview The Bioinformatics industry has grown to keep up with the information explosion, growing at 25-50% a year. In 2000, the US market Research company estimated that the value of the Bioinformatics industry would touch $2 billion. Now it s demand for individuals capable of doing bioinformatics is soaring. Industry's demand for scientists with skills in Bioinformatics far exceeds the supply of qualified specialists in the field, Seems likely that this figure will be reached within the coming year. Therefore, companies are developing methods of spotting potential Bioinformatics experts and then training them on the job.
Bioinformatics and computational biology Bioinformatics and computational biology each maintain close interactions with life sciences to realize their full potential. Bioinformatics applies principles of information sciences and technologies to make the vast, diverse, and complex life sciences data more understandable and useful. Computational biology uses mathematical and computational approaches to address theoretical and experimental questions in biology. Although bioinformatics and computational biology are distinct, there is also significant overlap and activity at their interface.
Biocomputing Biocomputing is often used as a catch-all term covering all this area at the intersection of Biology and Computation , although many other terms are used to name the same area. We can distinguish in to (non-disjoint) sub-fields:
- Bioinformatics - this includes management of biological databases, data mining and data modeling, as well as IT-tools for data visualization
- Computational Biology - this includes efforts to solve biological problems with computational tools (such as modeling, algorithms, heuristics)
- DNA computing and nano-engineering - this includes models and experiments to use DNA (and other) molecules to perform computations
- Computations in living organisms - this is concerned with constructing computational components in living cells, as well as with studying computational processes taking place daily in living organisms
The most pressing tasks in bioinformatics involve the analysis of sequence information. Computational Biology is the name given to this process, and it involves the following:
- Finding the genes in the DNA sequences of various organisms
- Developing methods to predict the structure and/or function of newly discovered proteins and structural RNA sequences.
- Clustering protein sequences into families of related sequences and the development of protein models.
- Aligning similar proteins and generating phylogenetic trees to examine evolutionary relationships.
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