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Introduction to Bioinformatics


           Bioinformatics is branch of biological and biomedical sciences and it is an application for the management of the vast biological information. Technically, Bioinformatics is the combination of biological sciences and information technology. In this field, the computers, softwares and online databases are used to gather, store, analyze and integrate biological information and genetic information. These information can then be applied to gene-based drug discovery, protein engineering and development. With the help of this, an investigator can store or analyze the genetic information in understanding the human diseases  and in the identification of new potential molecular targets and drug discovery. Bioinformatics can also be applied to study the fundamental biomedical problems. 

Biological Databases:

Huge amount of data of nucleotides, proteins and structures can not be written in a book.. Its gonna take a lot of time and effort to write those data.. But, technology has evolved in a such a way that we can practically store vast amount of data in an online databases and these databases are publically available. 


Data generated are deposited in online databases which are publically accessible. These data include nucleotide sequences of genes or amino acid sequences of proteins. and there are some databases which have the data of function, structure, localization, mutations, and also the similarities of biological sequences from species to species. (Localization includes both chromosomal and cellular). 

There are mainly three types of databases: 

1) Nucleotide Sequence Database
2) Protein Sequence Database
3) Molecular Structure Database. 

Examples of Databases: 

EMBL = European Molecular Biology Laboratory. 

GenBank = This is nucleotide database and it is maintained by NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information). 

NCBI is itself a database which has contains lot of biological information and it is a part of NIH. 

DDBJ = DNA Data Bank of Japan. 

Unigen = Non-redundant database of gene-oriented clusters. 

EBI Genomes = Complete Genome Statistics. 

Ensembl = Software to produce and maintain automatic annotations of eukaryotic genomes. 

SWISS-PROT = Manually Curated biological database of protein sequences. 

PIR = Protein Information Resource, to support genomic and proteomic research. 

UniProt = Universal Protein Database, a central repository of protein data. 

PROSITEIt =  Protein Families and Domains Database. 

Pfam = Protein families database of alignments and Hidden Markov Models. 

PDB = Protein Data Bank, 3-D structural data of proteins and nucleic acids. 

SCOP = Structural Classification of Proteins, it classifies the protein 3-D structures in hierarchy. 

CATH = Class Architecture Topology Homologous Super Family, hierarchical classification of protein domain structures. 

KEGG = Kyoto Encyclopedia of Gene and Genomes, collection of online databases of genomes, biological chemicals and enzymatic pathways. 

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