Skip main navigation

New offer! Get 30% off your first 2 months of Unlimited Monthly. Start your subscription for just £35.99 £24.99. New subscribers only T&Cs apply

Find out more

Home / Healthcare & Medicine / Biology & Biotechnology / Pharmacotherapy: Understanding Biotechnology Products / Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics

video
View transcript
14.5
Last but not the least, bioinformatics. Bioinformatics is the application of computer technology to the management of the vast amount of biological and genetic information, including collection, storage, analysis and integration of the data. And as you can tell or as we mentioned earlier, bioinformatics is actually a spinoff from the Human Genome Project which has completed the human genome mapping. And because of the vast amount of data generated by the Human Genome Project, we need bioinformatics to manage the data.
71.5
So the need for bioinformatics is a summation because of the explosion of the publicly available genomic information.
85
There are four major areas of bioinformatics applications, one is Structure Analysis, Sequence Analysis, Function Analysis, and Data mining. And with the correct algorithm with the efficient software programs and with the comprehensive database, our job or the job of biochemistry is made so much easier because now the Structure Analysis, Functional Analysis, and the Sequence Analysis can be done at a much faster pace and at a lower cost. And in the following, I have several slides for bioinformatics exercise. And the objective is to become familiar with the BLAST bioinformatics resource which is available on the Internet. And here is the map or the amino sequence for a protein.
167.8
And what I would like you to invite you to do is go to the National Center for Biotechnology website. National Center for Biotechnology now has essentially become a biotechnology library, sort of. And let’s copy and paste the protein sequence above in the previous slide into the blank search box. And then you can click on BLAST.
205.2
And you can select “Choose Search Set” and enter “Saccharomyces cerevisiae”. That was I want you to limit the search to a certain bacterial species. And here are the questions that I want to ask you. What is the acronym for BLAST? And what is the name of the unknown protein based on that amino acid sequence? And what is the name of the protein that is the best match when the search is limited to Saccharomyces cerevisiae? And that was if the search is limited a certain bacteria the result would be different. And define the E value. E value is the Expect value.
261.5
And if you want to find a good match, do you want a high E value or do you want a low E value? So the process of the procedures or the instructions are given on this slide. And I hope you would take leisure take your time to work on it at the leisure and I hope you’ll find interesting and exciting. And this concludes the lecture “Biotechnology principles, techniques, and tools”. And I will see you next time again.

Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary science that develops capacities for storage, retrieval, organization and analysis of biological data. It arises because of the need to manage the explosion of publicly available genomic information from the human genome project. As an application of bioinformatics, data mining has quickly become a powerful tool to discover patterns in large data for useful information (e.g., disease trait in a certain population)

Bioinformatics is composed of two major elements: The computation that requires algorithm development, software development and database construction The application that provides sequence analysis, function analysis and structure analysis BLAST, the most widely used software in bioinformatics research is introduced herein. An exercise is undertaken to compare the query sequence to sequences in a large database. BLAST then reports the best matches, or “hits,” found in the database.

Want to keep learning?

This content is taken from Taipei Medical University online course
Pharmacotherapy: Understanding Biotechnology Products
View Course
See other articles from this course
This article is from the online course:

Pharmacotherapy: Understanding Biotechnology Products

Created by
Join Now
This article is from the free online

Pharmacotherapy: Understanding Biotechnology Products

Created by
Join Now
FutureLearn - Learning For Life

Reach your personal and professional goals

Unlock access to hundreds of expert online courses and degrees from top universities and educators to gain accredited qualifications and professional CV-building certificates.

Join over 18 million learners to launch, switch or build upon your career, all at your own pace, across a wide range of topic areas.

Start Learning now

Register to receive updates

  • Create an account to receive our newsletter, course recommendations and promotions.

    Register for free