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BIOINFORMATICS SOFTWARE TOOLS |
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Bioinformatics involve the use of techniques including applied mathematics, informatics, statistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, chemistry, and biochemistry to solve biological problems usually on the molecular level. Major research efforts in the field include sequence alignment, gene finding, genome assembly, protein structure alignment, protein structure prediction, prediction of gene expression and protein-protein interactions, and the modeling of evolution.
The bioinformatics tools can be categorized in to the following categories: Biological Databases : These biological databases usually contain genomic, proteomic and metabolomic data, but databases are also used in taxonomy. The data include nucleotide sequences of genes or amino acid sequences of proteins. Furthermore information about function, structure, localisation (both cellular and chromosomal), clinical effects of mutations as well as similarities of biological sequences and structures can be found.
Sequence alignment tools : a way of arranging the primary sequences of DNA, RNA, or protein to identify regions of similarity that may be a consequence of functional, structural, or evolutionary relationships between the sequences.
Sequence manipulation tools : The Sequence Manipulation tools are software programs for analyzing and formatting DNA and protein sequences.
Sequence analysis tools ; The term "sequence analysis" in biology implies subjecting a DNA or peptide sequence to sequence alignment, sequence databases, repeated sequence searches, or other bioinformatics methods on a computer. Sequence analysis in molecular biology and bioinformatics is an automated, computer-based examination of characteristical fragments, e.g. of a DNA-strand.
Structural analysis tools : This set of tools allow you to compare structures with the known structure databases. The function of a protein is more directly a consequence of its structure rather than its sequence with structural homologs tending to share functions. The determination of a protein's 2D/3D structure is crucial in the study of its function.
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