Structural Biochemistry/Bioinformatics

What Is Bioinformatics?

Bioinformatics is a field of science which use the advantage of computer technology to analyze the molecular biology. The method in bioinformatics field can be derived from statistics, linguistics, mathematics, chemistry, biochemistry, and physics. Sequence or structural data of nucleic acids or peptide chain as well as the experimental data can be used as data by the scientists in the bioinformatics field^[1].

What is the advantage of Bioinformatics?

1. Create an e-library of biological database

Biological database is the organized biological information stored electrically and able to revive. For example, a biological database can be a record of a nucleic acid sequence with the name, input sequence, the scientific name of the organism it was isolated from^[2].

In this computing era, the storage database give a great convenient for the communication between scientists. The data in the e-library can be used widely by people from scientists , students to knowledgeable laymen.

2. New methods to interact with molecular biology

Since analyzing molecular biology is one of main fields in bioinformatics, bioinformatics researches focus on creation of new tools, the methods to storage, retrieval and analysis the material such as protein sequences.

The methods to analyze target samples are usually computer programs which will help researchers determine the structure of interesting sample or help scientists enable determine the family group for the sample from storage data. One common program used in bioinformatics is BLAST, Basic Local Alignment Search Tool. The outcome of BLAST search is a list of sequence alignments which will help researchers identify homologous sequences of the sample sequence from the database of known sequences^[3].

3. Explore evolution

Proteins with a common ancestor will have resemble amino acid sequences^[3]. Therefore, with the information of sequence and structural data, scientists can organize an unknown protein into groups and reconstruct the evolution of the protein. Sequence alignment method is a technique to detect homologous genes or proteins. The evolution relationship of two genes or proteins will determine by calculating the score with identity matrix or substitution matrix . Structural alignment method, comparing tertiary structure of proteins, also can explore the evolution relationship of two protein sequences. Then, scientists can create evolution tree for proteins as well as for the life in this planet^[3].

Related Fields

Fields that are related to bioinformatics include^[4]:

Biophysics- a field where biology is investigated using the techniques and concepts found in the physical sciences.

Pharmacogenomics- as it relates to bioinformatics, a field where the techniques of bioinformatics are used to store and process pharmacological and genetic information of the whole genome.

Pharmacogenetics- similar to pharmacogenomics, it uses bioinformatic and genomic techniques to focus on one to a few genes and identify the correlates of genomes.

Medical informatics- is a discipline where computer applications such as algorithms and structures are used to help effectively convey and process medical information.

Mathematical biology- is a field that focuses on using mathematical tools and methods to represent, evaluate, and model the processes of biology.

Computational biology- much like bioinformatics, involves using computer applications and statistical methods to solve biological problems. As such, biological modeling, simulation, and imaging make techniques such as RNA structure and gene prediction, sequence alignment algorithms, and multiple sequence alignment possible.

Proteomics- is the study of the proteome. The proteome is complete collection of proteins that is expressed by a cell, tissue, or organism. The proteins are complementary for a specific genome.

Genomics- the purpose of this scientific branch is to investigate the genome, an organism's complete DNA sequence, through using methods of DNA sequencing and mapping.

Cheminformatics- is the use of computers and information technology to solve problems found in chemistry.

Reference

[1] Nelson, David L. and Cox, Michael M. Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry. New York: W. H. Freeman & Company. 2008

[2] National Center for Biotechnology Information <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/>

[3] Berg, Jeremy M., Tymoczko, John L. and Stryer, Lubert. Biochemistry. New York: W. H. Freeman & Company. 2007

[4] Bioinformatics Organization. 2010. <http://wiki.bioinformatics.org/Bioinformatics_FAQ>