Download CS 368 Introduction to Computer Science

Introduction to Bioinformatics
Prologue
Bioinformatics
• Living things have the ability to store,
utilize, and pass on information
• Bioinformatics strives to
– determine what information is biologically
important
– decipher how it is used to precisely control the
chemical environment within living organisms
What is Bioinformatics
• The combination of
Biology and Informatics
• The use of computational tools to organize
and analyze genetic and protein
sequence data
– First coined by
Dr. Hwa Lim in 1988 OR
Dr. Paulien Hogeweg in the seventies ??
Definition of Bioinformatics
• NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology
Information, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/)
– “Bioinformatics is the field of science in which
biology, computer science, and information
technology merge to form a single discipline.”
– “The ultimate goal of the field is to enable the
discovery of new biological insights as well as to
create a global perspective from which unifying
principles in biology can be discerned.”
The quotations on this and next slides are from
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/About/primer/bioinformatics.html.
Why Informatics
What Informatics Can Do
• Development of new algorithms and statistics
– Assess relationships among members of large data
sets
• Analysis and interpretation of various types of
data
– Such as nucleotide and amino acid sequences,
protein structures, and gene expression
• Development and implementation of tools
– Enable efficient access and management of different
types of information
The Course
• IS NOT
– a Biology course – but Biology will be covered
– to teach you to become an expert Perl programmer –
although we will use Perl for programming
assignments
– a tool class – albeit tools will be introduced and
studied, and used for our labs
• IS
– a CS course to study bioinformatics from computer
science’s perspective
– to show you how algorithms, data structures, math,
and software development are applied to solving
biological problems
The Course
• Goals
– To study fundamental concepts of bioinformatics from
computer science’s perspective
– To become knowledgeable in this field
• Work / communicate with bioinformaticians / scientists
• Starting point to become a bioinformatician
• Read articles in this field
– To have fun
• If you are serious
– Learn more biochemistry and molecular biology
– Learn more CS / math / statistics
– Communicate/work with people in this field
The Instructor
• Fond of math, but not good at biology at
high school
• Computer scientist by training
• Bioinformatics educator by being curious
first, then followed by interest and selflearning
Future: 50 or 500 Years?
• “Biology has at least 50 more interesting
years.” James D. Watson, Nobel laureate,
December 31, 1984
• “Biology easily has 500 years of exciting
problems to work on, …” Donald Knuth, in
Computer Literacy Interview by Dan
Doernberg, December 7th, 1993