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Bioinformatics and computational biology involve the use of techniques from applied mathematics, informatics, statistics, and computer science to solve biological problems. Research in computational biology often overlaps with systems biology. Major research efforts in the field include sequence alignment, gene finding, genome assembly, protein structure alignment, protein structure prediction, prediction of gene expression and protein-protein interactions, and the modeling of evolution.
The terms bioinformatics and computational biology are often used interchangeably, although the former typically focuses on algorithm development and specific computational methods, while the latter focuses more on hypothesis testing and discovery in the biological domain. Although this distinction is used by National Institutes of Health in their working definitions of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, it is clear that there is a tight coupling of developments and knowledge between the more hypothesis-driven research in computational biology and technique-driven research in bioinformatics. Computational biology also includes lesser known but equally important subdisciplines such as computational biochemistry and computational biophysics.
A common thread in projects in bioinformatics and computational biology is the use of mathematical tools to extract useful information from noisy data produced by high-throughput biological techniques such as genomics (The field of data mining overlaps with computational biology in this regard). A representative problem in bioinformatics is the assembly of high-quality DNA sequences from fragmentary "shotgun" DNA sequencing, while in computational biology, a representative problem might be statistical testing of a hypothesis of common gene regulation using data from mRNA microarrays or mass spectrometry.
More on [ Bioinformatics ]
Informatics :: Medicine
Proteomics :: Proteins and Enzymes
Human :: Mammal
Informatics :: Biodiversity
Phenotypic categorization of genetic skin diseases reveals new relations between phenotypes, genes and pathways
Sadreyev, R. I., Feramisco, J. D., Tsao, H., Grishin, N. V. Motivation: Systematic analysis of connection between proteins, their cellular function and phenotypic manifestations in disease is a central problem of biological and clinical research. The solution to this problem requires the development of new approaches to link the rapidly growing dataset of gene–disease associations with the many complex and overlapping phenotypes of human disease. Results: We analyze genetic skin disorders and suggest a manually designed set of elementary phenotypes whose combinations define diseases as points in a multidimensional space, providing a basis for phenotypic disease clustering. Placing the known gene–disease associations in the context of this space reveals new patterns that suggest previously unknown functional links between proteins, signaling pathways and disease phenotypes. For example, analysis of telangiectasias (spider vein diseases) reveals a previously unrecognized interplay between the TGF-β signaling pathway and pentose phosphate pathway. This interaction may mediate glucose-dependent regulation of TGF-β signaling, providing a clue to the known association between angiopathies and diabetes and implying new gene candidates for mutational analysis and drug targeting. Contact: grishin@chop.swmed.edu Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
The Bioinformatics Organization, Inc. - Bioinformatics society open to all people. Strong emphasis on open access to biological information as well as Free and Open Source software.
The Ensembl Project - Ensembl is a joint project between EMBL-EBI and the Sanger Centre to develop a software system which produces and maintains automatic annotation on eukaryotic genomes.
Bioinformatics and Biological Computing - Comprehensive bioinformatics site, with access to multiple database searching and sequence analysis tools - from the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Meta Description: [ Bioinformatics and Biological Computing ]
Bioinformatics Resources - Resource for searching genetic databases, online tools, journals, and recent news.
DNA Structural Atlas - Easy-to-use summary of genomic information currently available for all organisms-from the Technical Univ. of Denmark.
European Molecular Biology Network - EMBnet is the only organisation world-wide bringing bioinformatics professionals to work together to serve the expanding fields of genetics and molecular biology.
Society for Bioinformatics in the Nordic Countries - SocBiN is a non-profit organisation for people working with and interested in bioinformatics. One task of the society is to arrange annual conferences on Bioinformatics.
The International Society for Computational Biology - The International Society for Computational Biology is dedicated to advancing the scientific understanding of living systems through computation; the emphasis is on the role of computing and informatics in advancing molecular biology.
Wikiomics - Editable by the whole bioinformatics community, Wikiomics provides bioinformatics tutorials and reviews that are kept up-to-date by the readers themselves.
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