Bioinformatics has a long history. begins with the advancement of molecular biology techniques in uncovering the biology of protein sequences since the early 1950s. Along with time and aggressive progress of an era, the development of databases and biological sequence analysis techniques accelerated rapidly. while DNA sequence databases were developed in the late 1970s in the United States and Germany. This paved the way for genome disclosure projects, which increased the need for management and sequence analysis and ultimately led to the birth of bioinformatics.
In general, Bioinformatics is a study that combines the disciplines of molecular biology, mathematics, and information engineering to solve biological problems. It is defined as the application of computation and analysis tools to capture and interpret biological molecular data.
To this day, bioinformatics has become big business. Biotech companies that produce big data like genome sequencing companies always need a part of bioinformatics analysis. Bioinformatics products have also been patented in the US, Europe, and Asia.
For a glimpse of an example, bioinformatics can be applied in the agricultural sector. like the Oryza sativa (rice plant) genome has been successfully mapped, producing 430 million nucleotides. This genome is used as a model in studying other monocot plants. Based on this genome as well, scientists have produced various varieties of rice plants that can increase crop yields, resistance to plant disease, and adaptable to environmental conditions. The use of bioinformatics in agriculture also targets the design of applicable products to overcome tobacco mosaic virus infection, control of pests against Aedes aegepty mosquitoes, spider pests, phytophagous insects, and protection of transgenic plants.
In the health sector, Bioinformatics has a great deal of contribution.
Bioinformatics for Drug/medicine Discovery. One way to find a drug against disease is to find a compound that suppresses the proliferation of an agent that causes the disease. Because the proliferation of the agent is influenced by many factors, these factors are the targets to find that compound. One of them is amino acid replacement analysis. This technique used to be done randomly, so it took a long time. After Bioinformatics was developed, the analyzed protein data could be accessed freely by anyone, both the amino acid sequence data and its 3D structure, all of these processes can be done faster and thus more efficiently both in terms of time and financially.
Bioinformatics for Identification of New Disease Agents. Bioinformatics also provides a very important tool for the identification of disease agents whose causes are unknown. Bioinformatics plays several important roles in this regard. The first is in the process of reading the Coronavirus genome. Because in databases such as GenBank, EMBL (European Molecular Biology Laboratory), and DDBJ (DNA Data Bank of Japan), sequence data for several Coronaviruses are available, which can be used to design primer used for amplification of the SARS virus DNA. Second, in the process of looking for similar sequences (homology alignment) of viruses obtained with other viruses. The third is to analyze the extent to which a virus is different from other viruses.
Personalized medicine, with diseases of a genetic nature, the information obtained using bioinformatics is very useful in determining medical measures for patients.
all the above is just a tiny glimpse of examples. There is more to what bioinformatics can offer from the business perspective. looking at the vast and rapid internet growth, the evolution of bioinformatics will be unstoppable and that’s means business.
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