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, –“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

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 self- learning

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