Bioinformatics - Sequences and Computers

The information for the make-up of living organisms is stored in the sequences of nucleotides in DNA. DNA serves two purposes: to provide information during the life cycle of a cell and to pass on the information to offspring during cell replication. The discovery of genes and the genetic code triggered the hope to someday be able to decipher the information stored in our genes -- and today we are able to do so: massive progress in sequencing technology has delivered entire genomes to the tips of our fingers. The era of genomics and proteomics has opened up the opportunity to go beyond the analysis of single genes and proteins, towards understanding the interactions between all components of genomes and proteomes. While, previously, we attempted to comprehend life by cutting it into smaller and smaller pieces we are now beginning to understand it from the ground up by analyzing the information contained in life's blueprint.

Computer scientists are important allies for biologists in the struggle to understand the information in DNA and protein sequences. On one hand large-scale genome sequencing efforts require new tools to generate, proof, store, and access the resulting exorbitant amount of data. On the other hand, the deciphering of genomes necessitates the development of new hard- and software that allow to detect genes, determine interactions between them, study gene expression,in order to be able to understand the molecular basis of development and disease.
Bioinformatics provides the tools to identify and understand the information in the biological molecules of DNA, RNA, and proteins. The two major work routines of bioinformaticists are: 1) comparing sequences in order to identify similarities, and 2) analyzing sequence composition in order to identify patterns. The analysis of sequence similarity allows the identification of relationships between genes, proteins, and/or organisms. The dsicovery of sequence patterns which are associated with functional units such as genes and characteristics such as particular biochemical reactions or cellular functions, is applied to the prediction of genes and regulatory regions in genomes. In protein analysis it is used to determine the structure and function of proteins, e.g. in motif identification.