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Introduction to Bioinformatics. Prologue. Bioinformatics. Living things have the ability to store, utilize, and pass on information Bioinformatics strives to determine what information is biologically important
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Introduction to Bioinformatics Prologue
Bioinformatics • Living things have the ability to store, utilize, and pass on information • Bioinformatics strives to • determine what information is biologically important • decipher how it is used to precisely control the chemical environment within living organisms
What is Bioinformatics • The combination of Biology and Informatics • The use of computational tools to organize and analyze genetic and protein sequence data(first coined by Dr. Hwa Lim in 1988)
Definition of Bioinformatics • NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) • “Bioinformatics is the field of science in which biology, computer science, and information technology merge to form a single discipline.” • “The ultimate goal of the field is to enable the discovery of new biological insights as well as to create a global perspective from which unifying principles in biology can be discerned.” The quotations on this and next slides are from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/About/primer/bioinformatics.html.
Why CS and What CS Can Do • Interesting problems and a lot of data to deal with … • “the development and implementation of tools that enable efficient access to, and use and management of, various types of information” • “the development of new algorithms (mathematical formulas) and statistics with which to assess relationships among members of large data sets, such as methods to locate a gene within a sequence, predict protein structure and/or function, and cluster protein sequences into families of related sequences”
The Course • IS NOT • a Biology course – but Biology will be covered • to teach you to become an expert Perl programmer – although we will use Perl for programming assignments • a tool class – albeit tools will be introduced and studied, and used for our labs • IS • a CS course to study bioinformatics from computer science’s perspective • to show you how algorithms, math, and programming are applied to solving biological problems
The Course • Goals • To study fundamental concepts of bioinformatics from computer science’s perspective • To become knowledgeable in this field • Work with bioinformaticians • Starting point to become a bioinformatician • Read articles in this field • To have interactions and fun • If you are serious • Learn more biochemistry and molecular biology • Communicate/work with biologists/biochemists
The Instructor • Liked math, disliked biology in high school • Computer scientist by training • Bioinformatics educator by curiosity first, then followed by interest and self-learning
Future: 50 or 500 Years? • “Biology has at least 50 more interesting years.” James D. Watson, Nobel laureate, December 31, 1984 • “Biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on, …” Donald Knuth, in Computer Literacy Interview by Dan Doernberg, December 7th, 1993