Transcript Prologue
Introduction to Bioinformatics Prologue Bioinformatics • Living things have the ability to store, utilize, and pass on information • Bioinformatics strives to – determine what information is biologically important – decipher how it is used to precisely control the chemical environment within living organisms What is Bioinformatics • The combination of Biology and Informatics • The use of computational tools to organize and analyze genetic and protein sequence data – First coined by Dr. Hwa Lim in 1988 OR Dr. Paulien Hogeweg in the seventies ?? Definition of Bioinformatics • NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) – “Bioinformatics is the field of science in which biology, computer science, and information technology merge to form a single discipline.” – “The ultimate goal of the field is to enable the discovery of new biological insights as well as to create a global perspective from which unifying principles in biology can be discerned.” The quotations on this and next slides are from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/About/primer/bioinformatics.html. Why Informatics What Informatics Can Do • Development of new algorithms and statistics – Assess relationships among members of large data sets • Analysis and interpretation of various types of data – Such as nucleotide and amino acid sequences, protein structures, and gene expression • Development and implementation of tools – Enable efficient access and management of different types of information The Course • IS NOT – a Biology course – but Biology will be covered – to teach you to become an expert Perl programmer – although we will use Perl for programming assignments – a tool class – albeit tools will be introduced and studied, and used for our labs • IS – a CS course to study bioinformatics from computer science’s perspective – to show you how algorithms, data structures, math, and software development are applied to solving biological problems The Course • Goals – To study fundamental concepts of bioinformatics from computer science’s perspective – To become knowledgeable in this field • Work / communicate with bioinformaticians / scientists • Starting point to become a bioinformatician • Read articles in this field – To have fun • If you are serious – Learn more biochemistry and molecular biology – Learn more CS / math / statistics – Communicate/work with people in this field The Instructor • Fond of math, but not good at biology at high school • Computer scientist by training • Bioinformatics educator by being curious first, then followed by interest and selflearning Future: 50 or 500 Years? • “Biology has at least 50 more interesting years.” James D. Watson, Nobel laureate, December 31, 1984 • “Biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on, …” Donald Knuth, in Computer Literacy Interview by Dan Doernberg, December 7th, 1993