In recent times bioinformatics has emerged as a power technology to revolutionize research in Life Science. Bioinformatics has been very much helpful in many ways be it Accelerating the process, Creation of Efficient Pipelines, More reliable results, Processes to validate the Wetlab Results Etc.
WHAT IS BIOINFORMATICS?
It is a field at the interface between the Biological Science & Comper Science where we use the information/Knowledge from Lifescience and implement them with the help of Computer Science techniques. In some cases Bioinformatics can be used accelerate the process and complete the work in lesser amount of time whereas in some cases it can be used to validate some wetlab results as well.
They can also be considered as one of the most important purpose of Bioinformatics So based on one’s requirements it can be used in a number of ways. In Short if i summarize the Bioinformatics meaning so i can say that it is a collaboration between knowledge of Life Science with Applications of Computer Science techniques.
Now Before we head towards understanding the different application of Bioinformatics let us first understand the most important part of the Bioinformatics work i.e. It’s Databases which most of the people ignore. One must have a good knowledge of Different Available Databases for retrieval of different types of Data.
BIOINFORMATICS DATABASES
The below mentioned databases serves as one stop solution for all your data requirements. So, lets check out some of the databases one by one
1. NCBI – National Centre for Biotechnology Information
This is one of the first databases designed by the different departs of US Government. It is one of the huge databases with almost all the required information right from Protein, Nucleotide Sequences to Libraries of Journal & Publication Papers. One must know what they need and you will find it on NCBI repositories.
Along with providing different database solutions for life science stream NCBI also hosts some of the powerful and recognized tools to perform basic analysis also.
2. PUBCHEM
This is also one of the repositories hosted at NCBI which helps us by providing the Chemical structures information about different chemical compounds. You name any chemical compound and you will find it on PubChem with all the required information for that particular chemical compound.
https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
3. PUBMED
This is one of the most important repositories of NCBI where you can find information about different diseases published in reputed journals of NCBI itslef. Once can get any medical related research paper for any kind of Disease or Illness here.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
4. SRA – Sequence Read Archive
This is one of the most important repository of NCBI for those who are working in the field of Genome Analysis here you can find a number of genome sequences right from microbial one’s to the Human genome sequences generated during different research projects across the globe. Also, since July 2018 SRA is only taking the submissions related to Human Genome Sequences.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra
5. EMBL – EBI (European Bioinformatics Institute)
It is also a parallel database to NCBI. Just like NCBI it is also a very vast database with a number of tools for carrying out different types of analysis. It also has it’s own gene bank, genome database, chemical Database, Etc.
EMBL as name suggests was developed by consortium in Europe.
6. KEGG – Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes & Genomes
This is a Database developed in Japan helps the researchers by providing the detailed pathways of any disease or any microbial activity in the human body. This database is very helpful for the researchers who are working in the field of Drug Discovery or Genome Analysis mainly.
7. DDBJ – DNA Data Bank of Japan
It is another database developed in Japan which contains a lot of information information about the DNA. Earlier the access to DDBJ was restricted inside Japan only. But in late 2015 it was opened to the whole world now anyone from around the world can access this database.
https://www.ddbj.nig.ac.jp/index-e.html
8. PDB – Protein Data Bank
Anyone working in the field of Bioinformatics has come across the term PDB it is a format for 3D stuctures of Prtoein & Ligand molecules. PDB is the only and the largest repository of Protein 3D structures in the world any kind of protein you are working with you can get a 3 D structure for that from Protein Data Bank.
Anyone can submit their protein 3 D structures in protein data bank the only condition is that the structures should extracted from x-ray crystallography.
So, these were some of the important databases used commonly while working with Bioinformatics.Anyone from anywhere in the world can access and submit the information in these databases with some conditions to be adhere with based on the requirements mentioned by each database.
APPLICATIONS OF BIOINFORMATICS
A brief discussion about different Applications of Bioinformatics, AIM of Bioinformatics i have covered in a separate article which is available HERE. So many people have so many doubts like is bioinformatics a good career, Is bioinformatics a demand, Does bioinformatics have a future Etc. So I would like to say that Bioinformatics have a lot of scope & lot of research potential one needs to find their field of interest and get well versed with it.
Because in Bioinformatics we always need to be ready for Troubleshooting and anytime we may need to go back to the basics and start looking at the problems. It is not a necessity to know programming language for working in Bioinformatics to get your day to day work done but if you are trying to create something of your own then it will be very helpful if you know anyone of the programming languages. There are a lot of software tools which work only with command line but if you have basics of using a computer and little bit of common sense you can use these tools without any problems.
LIMITATIONS BIOINFORMATICS
Coming down to a very crucial question most of the wetlab people have when they are planning to migrate to Bioinformatics is that what are the limitations of Bioinformatics, In my experience the only limitation Bioinformatics has is the computational power we being the Biology background people don’t give much preference to using a good computer system and this is the only limitation while working in Bioinformatics as the biological data we may be using in Bioinformatics will be huge in size and hence we need a good computational power to process it. Apart from that the opportunities are endless.