Bioinformatics/Terminology
From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection
There are a number of existing Wikipedia articles on bioinformatics and computational biology; the article on biostatistics is also helpful.
There is some disagreement on the proper uses of the following terms. The meanings intended by the author are summarized below:
- Bioinformatics
- The science of the treatment of biological information, especially in large quantitites.
- Biostatistics
- The sub-discipline of Bioinformatics concerned with probability and hypothesis validation on biological data. The term Biostatistics predates "Bioinformatics" considerably.
- Computational Biology
- Computationally-intensive methods to treat biological information. Generally this implies treatment of large amounts of data, but not always.
- Functional Genomics
- The study of functional information derived from entire proteomes; alternatively, high-throughput study of protein functions in general.
- Genome
- All the genes derived from one organism make up a single genome.
- Genomics
- The study of information derived from entire genomes; alternatively, high throughput study of genes in general.
- Proteome
- All the proteins coded for by the sequences of a single genome, including their structures and functions, make a single proteome.
- Structural Genomics
- The study of structural information derived from entire proteomes; alternatively, high-throughput study of protein structures in general.
