Jornal de Filogenética e Biologia Evolutiva

Bioinformatics has Become a Crucial a Part of Many Areas of Biology

Abstract

Felice L. Bedford

Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the info sets are large and sophisticated. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combines biology, computing, information engineering, mathematics and statistics to research and interpret the biological data. Bioinformatics has been used for in silicon analyses of biological queries using mathematical and statistical techniques.

Bioinformatics includes biological studies that use programming as a part of their methodology, also as a selected analysis "pipelines" that are repeatedly used, particularly within the field of genomics. Common uses of bioinformatics include the identification of candidates’ genes and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Often, such identification is formed with the aim of higher understanding the genetic basis of disease, unique adaptations, desirable properties (esp. in agricultural species), or differences between populations. During a less formal way, bioinformatics also tries to know the organizational principles within macromolecule and protein sequences, called proteomics.