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ABSTRACT
This article deals with bioinformatics from its origins until now. The principal aim of this discipline, dedicated to the analysis of biological information, is to identify the information contained in the sequence of macromolecules and their structure. The in-depth analysis of protein and nucleic sequences and of genomes (such as the optimal alignment of two sequences, the search for similarities, etc.) is detailed in this article. Related to the objects of the studies of molecular biology and genomics, bioinformatics has recently welcome the development of new parallel techniques such as DNA chips.
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Jean-Michel CLAVERIE: Professor, Faculty of Medicine, Université de la Méditerranée and Genomic and Structural Information Laboratory, CNRS (Marseille)
INTRODUCTION
Bioinformatics is the discipline of analyzing biological information, mainly contained in the sequence of macromolecules (nucleic acids and proteins) and their three-dimensional structure. It is a theoretical branch of biology, largely predating the "genomics revolution" of the 1990s.
Bioinformatics is not simply the application of traditional computer science concepts and tools to biological data. It covers a whole range of highly specific techniques, intimately linked to the objects of study of molecular biology and genomics.
More recently, the introduction of massively parallel experimental techniques (e.g. DNA chips), producing a mass of digital data, has led bioinformaticians to adopt more general mathematical and statistical methods, developed in other scientific fields confronted with large volumes of data ("data mining").
Finally, bioinformatics is inextricably linked to the existence of major international public databases, the establishment of numerous Internet servers, and the "open access" attitude of its developers.
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Bibliography
Websites
BLAST portal and NCBI databases : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
Other fast BLAST server (Gigablaster) : http://www.igs.cnrs-mrs.fr/
Reference site on animal genomes: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ensembl/
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