Q.Give an account on bio informatics.

Bioinformatics is the interdisciplinary science of managing and interpreting the enormous volumes of biological data generated by modern molecular biology, using computational tools to extract meaningful biological insight from sequences, structures, and other 'omics' data.

Definition and scope

• Bioinformatics combines biology, computer science, mathematics, and statistics to acquire, store, organise, analyse, and visualise biological data -- most importantly nucleic acid (DNA/RNA) and protein sequences, but also structural, expression, and other 'omics' data.
• It emerged from the need to handle the explosive growth of sequence data following advances in DNA sequencing technology, culminating in projects like the Human Genome Project.

Key tools and resources

• Sequence databases -- GenBank, EMBL, and DDBJ store nucleotide sequences; SWISS-PROT and the Protein Data Bank (PDB) store protein sequence and 3-D structural data.
• Sequence-analysis/alignment tools -- programs such as BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) and FASTA compare a query sequence against databases to find similar sequences; tools like ClustalW perform multiple sequence alignment.
• Structure-prediction and modelling software -- used to predict how a protein folds into its 3-D structure from its amino-acid sequence.

Applications

1. Genome sequencing and annotation -- assembling raw sequence reads into complete genomes and identifying genes, regulatory regions, and their probable functions (central to projects like the Human Genome Project).
2. Comparative genomics and phylogenetics -- comparing genomes/sequences across species to study evolutionary relationships and construct phylogenetic trees.
3. Gene and protein function prediction -- inferring the likely function of a newly discovered gene/protein based on its similarity to already-characterised sequences. …