What is Bioinformatics?

Bioinformatics is the area of research, development or application of computational tools and approaches for expanding the use of biological data, including those to acquire, store, organize, archive, analyze or visualize such data. Its goal is to enable biological discovery based on existing information. Biological data is generally in the form of genetic material (nucleic acids) and the products of the genetic material (proteins). In the narrow sense, bioinformatics deals primarily with sequence analysis; in a broader definition bioinformatics may encompass other fields such as Genomics and Proteomics.

Who uses Bioinformatics, and why?

Bioinformatics approaches are used in many sub-disciplines in biology and medicine. These include pharmacology, drug development, gene therapy, microbial genome applications, molecular medicine, forensics, crop improvement, evolutionary studies, biotechnology, comparative studies, personalized medicine and many more. It is hard to imagine a field of biology or medicine which will be untouched by bioinformatics.

Bioinformatics provide methods for extracting the meaningful information from large quantities of sequence or gene expression data. Bioinformatic tools are software programs that are designed to carry out this analysis step. Data analysis tools fall into four major categories: Similarity Searching Tools, Protein Function Analysis, Structural Analysis and Sequence Analysis--

• Similarity Searching Tools search for homologous sequences. Homologous sequences are sequences that are related by divergence from a common ancestor. Thus the degree of similarity between two sequences can be measured while their homology is a case of being either true or false. This set of tools is often used to predict the function of a DNA or protein sequence of unknown function. This is accomplished by finding similarities between novel query sequences of unknown structure and function and database sequences whose structure and function have been elucidated.
• Protein Function Analysis applications are software tools that allow you to compare your protein sequence to the secondary (or derived) protein databases that contain information on three dimensional structure (motifs), conserved regions of amino acid sequence (signatures) and functional units of proteins (domains). Highly significant hits against these different pattern databases allow you to approximate the biochemical function of your query protein.
• Structural Analysis tools allow you to compare structures with the known structure databases. The function of a protein is more directly a consequence of its structure rather than its sequence. Structural homologs tend to share functions. The determination of a protein's 2D/3D structure is crucial in the study of its function.
• Sequence Analysis tools allows you to carry out further, more detailed analysis on your query sequence including evolutionary analysis, identification of mutations, hydropathy regions, CpG islands and compositional biases. The identification of these and other biological properties are all clues that aid the search to elucidate the specific function or evolutionary history of your sequence.

How do the Bioinformatics focus-courses complement the Informatics Certificate

Two, three credit courses in bioinformatics/genomics will be offered by the department of Biology. These courses will compliment the core courses of the informatics certificate and allow students to specialize in the application of informatics to molecular/cellular biology or evolutionary biology. Both courses will involve personalized projects allowing participants to expand upon and apply course concepts to their own current research or individual interests.

How will a Certificate in Informatics (Bioinformatics specialization) benefit my career?

The need for all researchers to have a basic competence in the area of bioinformatics has been eloquently expressed by the Working Group on Biomedical Computing, Advisory Committee to the Director, NIH (June 3, 1999 report). "What is needed is a higher level of competence in mathematics and computer science among biologists themselves. To make optimal use of information technology, biomedical researchers need, first of all, the expertise to marry information technology to biology in a productive way." Individuals trained in bioinformatics are capable of assuming a wide variety of jobs in academic, industry, and health care settings where expertise at the interface between information technology (IT) and molecular biology are required.

For additional information regarding the Informatics Certificate (Bioinformatics), Contact:

Dr. Robert Sheehy, Associate Professor
Radford University, Department of Biology
Phone:  540-831-5655;   E-mail  rsheehy@radford.edu