What is Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics is the use of computers, software tools, and databases to handle biological information. Bioinformatics is widely used for genomics and proteomics. Bioinformatics helps to sequence and analyse all of the genomic entities, including genes and transcripts, in an organism. It also helps in proteonomics to analyse the complete set of proteins or proteome. Bioinformatics is used in drug designing and drug development. Bioinformatics is one of the fastest growing filed, which will certainly reveal the mistries of life and many desieses. Bioinformatics has become a very important part of Biotechnology. All the information process by Biotechnology is stored and analysed using bioinformatics. Bioinformatics is the comprehensive application of mathematics, statistics, biochemistry, biophisics and computer algorithms to analyse biological data.

Introduction to Bioinformatics

Application of Bioinformatics in various fields:

1. Drug designing
2. Drug development
3. Gene therapy
4. Evolutionary studies
5. Biotechnology
6. Bio-weapon creation
7. Vetinary medicine
8. Molecular medicine
9. Improve quality for various products
10. Climate change Studies
11. Waste recycling
12. Prevention medicine
13. Agriculture
14. Forensic analysis
15. Development of high yeild crops
16. Antibiotic medicine
17. Pestisides
And More....

 

Skills Required for a Bioinformatician

As we know Bioinformatics is wide area, it will not be possible to learn all of them. The important topics that should be know are:
Molecular Biology
Should have a basic knowledge of molecular biology.

Experience with one or more of Molecular Biology software packages. Learn to use sequence analysis and molecular modeling software. Some of the molecular biology packages are BLAST, FASTA etc.

Windows and Linux
Should have the basic knowledge of both windows and Linux. Nowadays Linux (Free open source) is widely used in bioinformatics for is robustness and available tools & software for this platform, its very important to learn these operating system.

Computer Programming Language
C/C++, Perl, Python, Java and HTML should be known by Bioinformatician.

Database Management Systems
Oracle and MySQL (Free Database Server) is widely used to store large biological data.