Bioinformatics

The Term Bioinformatics

Paulien Hogeweg and Ben Hesper coined the term bioinformatics in 1978 to refer to the study of informatics processes in biotic systems. Bioinformatics is the application of information technology to the field of molecular biology and more generally asking biological questions with a computer. There was a time when biology happened mostly in dissection labs and test tubes and under microscopes. Due to the development of genomic technologies, biology has been transformed from a science in which the human effort was mainly oriented toward data gathering to a science that generates a huge volume of data. Many scientists today refer to the next wave in bioinformatics as systems biology, a new approach to tackling new and complex biological questions.

Use of Sophisticated Analytic Tools

Bioinformatics is about searching biological databases, comparing sequences, and looking at protein structures. Systems biology involves the integration of genomics, proteomics, and bioin-formatics information to create a whole-system view of a biological entity.

The origins of bioinformatics derive from the existence of biological databases. The first bioin-formatics or biological databases were constructed a few years after the first protein sequences of amino acids became available, resulting from work on insulin in 1956. After the formation of the databases, tools became available to search sequence databases. Since these early efforts, significant advances have been made in automating the collection of sequence information. Rapid innovation in biochemistry and instrumentation has brought us to the point where the entire genomic sequence of several organisms are known. Projects to elucidate more than 100 prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes are currently under way. The Internet is the virtual laboratory in which genomic research is now conducted.

In the early 1990s, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Energy (CERN) invented the World Wide Web (WWW) technology on the Internet (the now ubiquitous computer network developed earlier in the United States). The Web was the platform that solved many problems of maintenance, update, access, and integration of databases in molecular biology. In a way, without the WWW technology, the Human Genome Project would not have been possible.

The information archive within each organism is its genetic material (DNA and RNA). The human genome is only one of the many complete genome sequences known. The ENCODE Project (ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements) has the ultimate goal of developing methods for comprehensive identification of functional regions of the human genome, including coding and regulatory regions.

Roderic Guigó, one of the main characters in the race for the genome project culmination, said that life begins when the nucleotides are arranged in the sequence of the genome. It is the particular order of nucleotides in this sequence, rather than its physical and chemical properties, that dictate the biological characteristics of living beings.

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