The term bioinformatics was coined by Paulien Hogeweg in 1979 for the study of informatic processes in biotic systems. Its primary use since at least the late 1980s has been in genomics and genetics, particularly in those areas of genomics involving large-scale DNA sequencing.
Bioinformatics now entails the creation and advancement of databases, algorithms, computational and statistical techniques and theory to solve formal and practical problems arising from the management and analysis of biological data.
Over the past few decades rapid developments in genomic and other molecular research technologies and developments in information technologies have combined to produce a tremendous amount of information related to molecular biology. It is the name given to these mathematical and computing approaches used to glean understanding of biological processes.
Common activities in bioinformatics include mapping and analyzing DNA and protein sequences, aligning different DNA and protein sequences to compare them and creating and viewing 3-D models of protein structures.
The primary goal of bioinformatics is to increase the understanding of biological processes. What sets it apart from other approaches, however, is its focus on developing and applying computationally intensive techniques (e.g., pattern recognition, data mining, machine learning algorithms, and visualization) to achieve this goal. Major research efforts in the field include sequence alignment, gene finding, genome assembly, drug design, drug discovery, protein structure alignment, protein structure prediction, prediction of gene expression and protein-protein interactions, genome-wide association studies and the modeling of evolution.
EVOLUATIONARY BIOLOGY
Evolutionary biology is the study of the origin and descent of species, as well as their change over time. Informatics has assisted evolutionary biologists in several key ways; it has enabled researchers to:
* trace the evolution of a large number of organisms by measuring changes in their DNA, rather than through physical taxonomy or physiological observations alone,
* more recently, compare entire genomes, which permits the study of more complex evolutionary events, such as gene duplication, horizontal gene transfer, and the prediction of factors important in bacterial speciation,
* build complex computational models of populations to predict the outcome of the system over time
* track and share information on an increasingly large number of species and organisms
Future work endeavours to reconstruct the now more complex tree of life.The area of research within computer science that uses genetic algorithms is sometimes confused with computational evolutionary biology, but the two areas are not necessarily related.
SCOPE IN BIO-INFORMATICS IN INDIA
Bioinformatics career in is increasingly attracting the youngsters in India today. The scope of bioinformatics is in areas like database design and maintenance, sequence assembly, proteomics, clinical pharmacologist, sequence analysis, informatics developer and bio-analytics. Excellent job opportunities are available in Biotech and Pharmaceutical companies in India. Indian companies like Wipro, Reliance, Satyam, TCS and companies like Accelrys and IBM Life Sciences Pubgene, Silicon Genetics and Tessella offer good employments to the bioinformatics candidates. Due to increasing demand of bioinformatics candidates, a career in bioinformatics offer good prospects
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