In the last few decades, advances in molecular biology and the equipment
available for research in this field have allowed the increasingly rapid
sequencing of large portions of the genomes of several species. In fact,
to date, several bacterial genomes, as well as those of some simple
eukaryotes (e.g., Saccharomyces cerevisiae, or baker's yeast) have
been sequenced in full. The Human Genome Project, designed to sequence
all 24 of the human chromosomes, is also progressing. Popular sequence
databases, such as GenBank and EMBL, have been growing at exponential
rates. This deluge of information has necessitated the careful storage,
organization and indexing of sequence information. Information science
has been applied to biology to produce the field called
Bioinformatics.
The simplest tasks used in
bioinformatics concern the creation and maintenance of databases of
biological information. Nucleic acid sequences (and the protein sequences
derived from them) comprise the majority of such databases. While the
storage and or ganization of millions of nucleotides is far from trivial,
designing a database and developing an interface whereby researchers can
both access existing information and submit new entries is only the
beginning.
The most pressing
tasks in bioinformatics involve the analysis of sequence information.
Computational Biology is the name given to this process,
and it involves the following:
- Finding the genes in the
DNA sequences of various organisms
- Developing methods to predict
the
structure and/or function of newly discovered proteins and structural RNA
sequences.
- Clustering protein sequences into families of related
sequences and the development of protein models.
- Aligning
similar
proteins and generating phylogenetic trees to examine evolutionary
relationships.
The process of evolution has produced DNA
sequences that encode proteins with very specific functions. It is
possible to predict the three-dimensional structure of a protein using
algorithms that have been derived from our knowledge of physics, chemistry
and most importantly, from the analysis of other proteins with similar
amino acid sequences. The diagram below summarizes the
process by which DNA sequences are used to model
protein structure. The processes involved in this
transformation are detailed in the pages that follow.
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Last updated: July 23, 1998
URL: http://biotech.icmb.utexas.edu/pages/bioinform/BIintro.html
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