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In this article we will discuss about the concept and development of bioinformatics.
Concept of Bioinformatics:
Bioinformatics or life science informatics has emerged as a new branch of biotechnology, offering a fundamental tool to the biologist to accelerate commercialization of biotechnology. Bioinformatics is the classic example of convergence of biotechnology and information technology. Bioinformatics has been the most powerful tools for data mining in life science, analysis, data searching, integration and simulation of molecular biological data.
However, its main priority has been implicated in data storage and genome sequence analysis. The unprecedented growth of information technology and extraordinary growth in molecular biology and recombinant DNA technologies and their interrelated studies culminated into cutting edge technology like bioinformatics. Thus, bioinformatics is also termed as bio-computing or computational biology. Recently, genomics occupies central role in bioinformatics i.e., understanding the basic life process.
Development of Bioinformatics:
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The first appeared scientific literature on bioinformatics was published in 1991 by the name “Bioinformatics a new era”. One of the earliest endeavour to build database and create analysis algorithms in prophet, a unix-based software package that allowed scientist to store, analysis and perform mathematical modeling. Infact in 1982, free database called Gen Bank was set up to store DNA sequence data.
This database currently holds about 17 billion bases from more than 1,00,000 genes. In 1980’s, Intell-Genetics developed bioinformatics software called PC/GENE to translate gene sequences to proteins. This programme was meant for predicting protein secondary structure. In 1991, Amos Bairoca introduced the software Swiss-PROT, a protein sequence database.
Currently, Swiss-PROT is a curated protein database under EXPASY (Export Protein Analysis System) proteomics presently with the outcome of remarkable human genome project and making draft sequence available to the people was a landmark in the history of modern biology and science. This has generated immense tool to produce the whole gene catalogues of many microbes and the plant Arabidopsis.
