Bioinformatics

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.