Bioinformatics - Problem Domain
Bioinformatics is basically database mining (of biological data) i.e. the extraction, sorting, and analyzing of sequence information about genes, genomes and proteins. Genes have to be sequenced, in order to do that, they must be isolated and cloned into the appropriate form which will allow them to manipulated in the laboratory. Therefore, cloning and sequencing are not part of bioinformatics per se. Cloning and sequencing, combined with bioinformatics, however, are interwoven activities. The technical advancement of one activity greatly impacts the other two. The increasing number of sequences improve the quality of statistical analysis, while the development of new bioinformatics software allows for the identification of biological functions associated with sequence patterns, thus allowing faster detection and cloning of novel genes.
The last decade has proved to be tremendously satisfying due to its technical advances in genome sequencing (genomics) and protein identification (proteomics). The existence of public databases with billions of data entries requires a robust analytical approach to cataloging and representing this data with respect to its biological significance. The tool needed to handle this vast amount of data is bioinformatics, and the exponential increase in both computer processing power and disk storage has been instrumental in this age of genes and biotechnology. Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field bringing together techniques from machine learning, pattern recognition, statistics, databases and visualization to address the issue of information extraction from large biological databases.
