Bioinformatics Tools Training Program

Bioinformatics has become an important part of many areas of biology. In experimental molecular biology bioinformatics techniques such as image and signal processing allow extraction of useful results from large amounts of raw data. In the field of genetics, it aids in sequencing and annotating genomes and their observed mutations.

Sequences
Computers became essential in molecular biology when protein sequences became available after Fredrick sanger determined the sequence of insulin in the early 1950s. Comparing multiple sequences manually turned out to be impractical. Dayhoff compiled one of the first protein sequence databases, initially published as books and pioneered methods of sequence alignment and molecular evolution. These studies illustrated that well known features, such as the coding segments and the triplet code, are revealed in straightforward statistical analyses and were thus proof of the concept that bioinformatics would be insightful.

Computational evolutionary biology
Computational Evolutionary Biology s the study of the origin and descent of species, as well as their change over time. Bioinformatics has assisted evolutionary biologists by enabling 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,
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 speciations.
build complex computational population genetics models to predict the outcome of the system over time.
track and share information on an increasingly large number of species and organisms.

Storage and retrieval of data
In structural bioinformatics, data bases are used to store and organize data. Many of these entities to collect Nucleic acid sequences from scientific papers and genome projects. Many databases are in the hands of international consortia. For example, European Molecular Biology Laboratory Nucleotide Sequence Database (EMBL-Bank) in the United Kingdom, the DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ), and GenBank of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in the United States oversees the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC). To ensure that sequence data are freely available, scientific journals require that new nucleotide equences be deposited in a publicly accessible database as a condition for publication of an article. (Similar conditions apply to nucleic acid and protein structures.) There also exist genome browsers, databases that bring together all the available genomic and molecular information about a particular species.

The major database of biological macromolecular structure is the worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB), a joint effort of the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB) in the United States, the Protein Data Bank Europe (PDBe) at the European Bioinformatics Institute in the United Kingdom, and the Protein Data Bank Japan at Ōsaka University.