engleski

Why focusing on bioinformatics?

An explosive growth of bioinformatics during last decade tends to hide its much older humble origins as computational biology. Bioinformatics is application of computational techniques to understand and organize the information associated with biological macromolecules. This fruitful marriage of informatics and molecular biology can be attributed to the idea that life itself is an information technology. As a science, bioinformatics is living testimony to the truthfulness of the wise old thought that nothing in the living world makes sense except in the light of evolution. Today, life science researchers with competitive advantage are those who can master limitations and advantages of different biological databases and computational tools needed to exploit them. On another hand, the grant proposals that lack a bioinformatics component are already being turned down in countries with developed life science research evaluation. Bioinformatics offeres unique novel insights. After genomes of several hundred organisms have been sequenced it become clear that even genes of species that separated several hundred million years ago are still similar. After human genome has been decoded it become clear that that our genetic wisdom expressed through 20000 to 25000 genes is barely better than that of the worm Caenorhabitis elegans, or that of a tiny puffer fish Tetraodon nigroviridis, commonly kept in aquaria, with the smallest known verterbrate genome. It is the challenge for the bioinformatics to figure out unknown and no-doubt important functions for genome regions previously considered as junk DNA. Protein folding problem is also huge challenge, which probably requires novel ideas from physics, chemistry, informatics and bioinformatics to speed up simulated evolution of unfolded into folded protein state.

bioinformatics; protein sequence; human genome; protein topology; predictions

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