Biology Country - The Land of Bioinformatics

Hello, dear travellers!

My name is Mr. Carrot. I am your guide in the World of Biology. This world is inhabited with various creatures - animals, plants, viruses, their genes, genomes and biomolecules, they are made of.

Today we will explore one Land of this World - the Land of Bioinformatics.

People appeared in this Land in the middle of 20^th century when the Molecular Biology became the core of life science. At that time the first computer programs for biological calculations were elaborated.

In brief, Bioinformatics means an application of information techniques to the Molecular Biology data.

It is the area, where Biology, Computer Science, and Information Technologies integrated to form a new discipline. Its ultimate goal is to obtain a global perspective of fundamental biological processes.

At the beginning of the "genomic revolution", a bioinformatics concern was the creation and maintenance of databases to store biological information, such as nucleotide and amino acid sequences. The process of analyzing and interpreting data was called Computational biology.

Important sub-disciplines within Bioinformatics and Computational biology include:

• the development of tools, providing efficient access to various types of biological information data
• the development of new algorithms (mathematical formulas) to find regular patterns in large data sets:
  • to locate a gene within a sequence,
  • to predict protein structure and function,
  • to cluster protein sequences into families.

Now you can see the first beautiful landscapes of this country. Let me give you some tips before we start the tour.

• The terms look like this: Term - and if you keep your mouse over, you can read its meaning in pop-up frame.
• Another way to understand the word, which meaning you don't know, is to find it in our Dictionary.

If you want to travel with me - let’s go!