Our body is made up of trillions of cells. According to human genome project, the number of genes in each cell is approximately 20,000. This microscopic cell has an ultramicroscopic commanding centre called nucleus within which 2 m of DNA is elegantly packaged. The number of nucleotides is ~3x109. That much enormous data in a cell! How could we store this, access this data, analyze this data. Here comes the use of computers. We developed and used computers for the same purpose, efficient data storage retrieval and analysis. With the advancement in sequencing technology, each day thousands of nucleotides of different organisms are sequenced and submitted to the databases worldwide. In Bioinformatics, the use of computer is same as previously but the data is biological data, the letters of life. Actually we are now facing an information overload. Loads of sequence data but the real challenge is to make sense of this data.
Listed are some of the major uses of Bioinformatics.
• To store and retrieve biological data• To analyze the biological data like sequence patterns…
• To interpret biological data
• To predict 3-D structure of bio molecules
• To construct evolutionary trees that help us to find ancestry of different organisms