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What is Bioinformatics?
Biological databases
Biological databases are archives of consistent data that are stored in a uniform and
efficient manner. These databases contain data from a broad spectrum of molecular
biology areas. Primary or archived databases contain information and annotation of
DNA and protein sequences, DNA and protein structures and DNA and protein expression
profiles.
Secondary or derived databases are so called because they contain the
results of analysis on the primary resources including information on sequence
patterns or motifs, variants and mutations and evolutionary relationships.
Information from the literature is contained in bibliographic databases, such as Medline.
It is essential that these databases are easily accessible and that an intuitive query system
is provided to allow researchers to obtain very specific information on a particular biological
subject. The data should be provided in a clear, consistent manner with some visualisation tools
to aid biological interpretation.
Specialist databases for particular subjects have been set-up for example EMBL database for nucleotide sequence data, UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot protein database and PDBe a 3D protein structure database.
Scientists also need to be able to integrate the information
obtained from the underlying heterogeneous databases in a sensible manner in order to be able
to get a clear overview of their biological subject. SRS (Sequence Retrieval System)
is a powerful, querying tool provided by the EBI that links information from more than 150 heterogeneous
resources.
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What is Bioinformatics? <<< 3/5 >>> |
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