Download Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and

Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of
life and living organisms, including their structure,
function, growth, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Biology is the study of living
Biology is the study of living organisms
organisms
Common features:
Common
features:
- are
made
of cells
- are made of cells
- carry
own
information
- carry their
their own
information
- reproduce
- reproduce
- evolve
- evolve
What they do:
- convert
What
theymacromolecules
do:
- extract energy
- convert
macromolecules
- self-regulate
- extract energy
What they look like
- self-regulate
- megadiverse from outside
- more and more similar as you go inside
What they look like
- diverse from outside
- more and more similar as you go
All living forms are made of one
or more cells (viruses do not,
but are they alive?)
are made of
cells….
The same apply for plant cells
A cell:
-Carries its own genetic information encoded in DNA
-Translates this information in structural or effector elements,
generally proteins
-(divides to form a pluricellular animal, if it’s the case)
-Reproduces
The cell is made of water, an inf inite number of small
molecules, lipids, glucides, and so forth, although
bioinformatics mostly deals with DNA and proteins.
Monomers and polymers
-Fats
-Glucides (many monosaccarids)
-Proteins (20 aminoacids)
-Nucleic acids (4+1 nucleotides)
What’s about polymers
- Simplicity, many combinations with few building blocks
- Economy, building blocks can be reused
DNA
replication
The double helix is unwound by a helicase and topoisomerase
one DNA polymerase produces the leading strand copy.
Another DNA polymerase binds to the lagging strand.
This enzyme makes discontinuous segments (called Okazaki
fragments) before DNA ligase joins them together.
In summary, in DNA:
-Building blocks and their
assembly into DNA is
conserved.
Bioinformatics involves
manipulation,
searching,
-Sequence
is allthe
that
matters.
and data mining of biological data, and this includes
DNA sequence data.
-Three-dimensional
structure is
The development of techniques to store and search
DNA sequences have led to widely applied advances in
constant.
computer science, especially string searching
algorithms, machine learning and database theory.
Databases report DNA
In summary, in proteins:
-Building blocks and their assembly into proteins is conserved.
-Sequence is variable and important.
-Three-dimensional structure can vary and it does matter as well.
Databases report protein sequences (e.g. GenBank)
Others contain three dimensional structures (e.g. PDB)
The genetic code