Scope of Bioinformatics in Diverse Fields

It’s exciting. Any career, which integrates biology with computers falls under the field of Bioinformatics. It is also called computational biology. Bioinformatics is application of statistics and computer science to the field of molecular biology. For example, it makes use of Statistical methods such as hypothesis testing and estimation, Poisson processes, Markov models and hidden Markov models to search for patterns within a set of biological data. Such patterns can be used to determine diagnostic biomarkers for a particular disease, to measure the efficacy of a particular medical treatment, compare DNA sequences for similarity in order to define relatedness, such as between man and mouse, determine what biological responses are presented by surviving versus dying patients, and predict biological pathways. All these applications help to improve the quality of human life.  

Bioinformaticians are not computer Programmers; they are scientists who use computer to analyze huge volumes of information. From a simple point of view, both of the “Omics” makes use of bioinformatics to analyze huge amounts of data: genomics for genes and proteomics form proteins.

In almost every field of biology and chemistry there are huge numbers of machines that collect large amounts of 2D, 3D, and even 4D+ data. Things that collect images include microarrays, crystallography, NMR (after processing), electron microscopy, and many other techniques. In electron microscopy, specifically, image processing is the “rate-limiting step.” Basically, the way electron microscopy works is that you take many (thousands, millions, billions) of images of complex macromolecular assemblies on a surface. They are oriented randomly (e.g. rotation in x, y, and z are random), and so automated programs need to start collecting the images and classify which ones look similar, assume they have similar x/y/z rotation values. Based on this information, a 3D structure is then generated.

MRI, CT, PET and all the other medical imaging techniques also generate huge amounts of date, and are more complicated because of movement (heart beating, blood flow, patient movement, etc.).

Application of bioinformatics to biochemistry is done in protein structure determination. Right now, an important area of bioinformatics is “trans-membrane domain prediction”. Using knowledge of properties of the various amino acids in a protein, as well as Hidden Markov Model, some programs can predict how a putative gene’s protein product might wave itself back and forth through a cell membrane.

Also, there is an application of small molecule interactions, where one looks at how small drug molecules will bind to proteins or other drug targets. This process is called docking and contributes to the field of drug discovery.

As a cutting-edge bioinformaticist, one can apply the vast biochemistry knowledge to design the programs that determine membrane interaction and small molecule binding. Thus, these areas make ‘Bioinformatics’ a very vibrant and dynamic field of study, with a wide variety of useful applications.

                                                                 - Jitendra Gupta