Introduction to bioinformatics

Bioinformatics as its name means is the use of computer science or informatics materials (hardwares & softwares) to analyse biological data, this data includes (genetic data, molecular biology, microbiology, virology,) and many many topics of biology.

As we all know that genetic material is the one responsible for the design of all living organisms, then when we master the genetic code, we can get rid off all malfunctions provided by it (diseases).

Bioinformatics links to most biology branches (genetics, molecular biology, microbiology, epidemology, phylogeny, zoology,...etc )



The advances provides by technology made bioinformatics easy as eating a cake, because the human brain can't handle all of this huge amount of biological data, otherwise home computers now can do 4 billions operations per one second.

The main role of bioinformatics today is to do what humans brain can't do including:

1- Analyse and compare immense genetic data (code).
2- Finding similarities with other species genetic code.
3- Searching databases (genbank or swissprot) for a query sequence.
4- Establishing phylogenetic relashionships between species.
5- Finding 3D protein structures to understand better active sites....etc.

and the list will go on and on

Nowadays bioinformatics is making huge advances and providing accurate answers to medecine and other sciences like in the case of the TAMIFLU (medicament for the seasonal flu and the swine flu), that was born by bioinformatics on the computers screen.

If you have comments or questions, post.