Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combines biology, computer science, information engineering, mathematics and statistics to analyze and interpret the biological data. Bioinformatics has been used for in silico analyses of biological queries using mathematical and statistical techniques.
Biology – The natural science that involves the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy.
Genomics is an interdisciplinary field of biology focusing on the structure, function, evolution, mapping, and editing of genomes. A genome is an organism's complete set of DNA, including all of its genes. In contrast to genetics, which refers to the study of individual genes and their roles in inheritance, genomics aims at the collective characterization and quantification of all of an organism's genes, their interrelations and influence on the organism. Genes may direct the production of proteins with the assistance of enzymes and messenger molecules. In turn, proteins make up body structures such as organs and tissues as well as control chemical reactions and carry signals between cells. Genomics also involves the sequencing and analysis of genomes through uses of high throughput DNA sequencing and bioinformatics to assemble and analyze the function and structure of entire genomes. Advances in genomics have triggered a revolution in discovery-based research and systems biology to facilitate understanding of even the most complex biological systems such as the brain.
Computational biology involves the development and application of data-analytical and theoretical methods, mathematical modelling and computational simulation techniques to the study of biological, ecological, behavioural, and social systems. The field is broadly defined and includes foundations in biology, applied mathematics, statistics, biochemistry, chemistry, biophysics, molecular biology, genetics, genomics, computer science, and evolution.
A generegulatory network (GRN) is a collection of molecular regulators that interact with each other and with other substances in the cell to govern the gene expression levels of mRNA and proteins which, in turn, determine the function of the cell. GRN also play a central role in morphogenesis, the creation of body structures, which in turn is central to evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo).
Systems biology is the computational and mathematical analysis and modeling of complex biological systems. It is a biology-based interdisciplinary field of study that focuses on complex interactions within biological systems, using a holistic approach to biological research.
The branches of science known informally as omics are various disciplines in biology whose names end in the suffix -omics, such as genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and glycomics. Omics aims at the collective characterization and quantification of pools of biological molecules that translate into the structure, function, and dynamics of an organism or organisms.
The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics is an academic not-for-profit foundation which federates bioinformatics activities throughout Switzerland.
Computational genomics refers to the use of computational and statistical analysis to decipher biology from genome sequences and related data, including both DNA and RNA sequence as well as other "post-genomic" data. These, in combination with computational and statistical approaches to understanding the function of the genes and statistical association analysis, this field is also often referred to as Computational and Statistical Genetics/genomics. As such, computational genomics may be regarded as a subset of bioinformatics and computational biology, but with a focus on using whole genomes to understand the principles of how the DNA of a species controls its biology at the molecular level and beyond. With the current abundance of massive biological datasets, computational studies have become one of the most important means to biological discovery.
Physiomics is a systematic study of physiome in biology. Physiomics employs bioinformatics to construct networks of physiological features that are associated with genes, proteins and their networks. A few of the methods for determining individual relationships between the DNA sequence and physiological function include metabolic pathway engineering and RNAi analysis. The relationships derived from methods such as these are organized and processed computationally to form distinct networks. Computer models use these experimentally determined networks to develop further predictions of gene function.
John Quackenbush is an American computational biologist and genome scientist. He is a professor of biostatistics and computational biology and a professor of cancer biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI), as well as the director of its Center for Cancer Computational Biology (CCCB). Quackenbush also holds an appointment as a professor of computational biology and bioinformatics in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH).
Translational bioinformatics (TBI) is an emerging field in the study of health informatics, focused on the convergence of molecular bioinformatics, biostatistics, statistical genetics and clinical informatics. Its focus is on applying informatics methodology to the increasing amount of biomedical and genomic data to formulate knowledge and medical tools, which can be utilized by scientists, clinicians, and patients. Furthermore, it involves applying biomedical research to improve human health through the use of computer-based information system. TBI employs data mining and analyzing biomedical informatics in order to generate clinical knowledge for application. Clinical knowledge includes finding similarities in patient populations, interpreting biological information to suggest therapy treatments and predict health outcomes.
Eric Emil Schadt is an American mathematician and computational biologist. He is Dean for Precision Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Chief Executive Officer of Sema4, a spinout next generation health information company of the Mount Sinai Health System that provides advanced genomic testing and merges big data analytics with clinical diagnostics. He was previously founding director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology and chair of the Department of Genetics and Genomics Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Schadt’s work combines supercomputing and advanced computational modeling with diverse biological data to understand the relationship between genes, gene products, other molecular features such as cells, organs, organisms, and communities and their impact on complex human traits such as disease. He is known for calling for a shift in molecular biology toward a network-oriented view of living systems to complement the reductionist, single-gene approaches that currently dominate biology to more accurately model the complexity of biological systems. Schadt has also worked to engage the public, encouraging people to participate in scientific research and helping them understand privacy concerns around DNA-based information.
The Icahn Institute for Data Science and Genomic Technology is a biomedical and genomics research institute located in New York, NY. It is housed within the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Its aim is to generate and integrate many layers of biological, clinical, and environmental data in order to characterize and understand complex human diseases on a network level, and to use that data to advance information-driven medicine and to better diagnose and treat patients at Mount Sinai Hospital, New York and elsewhere.
The Biozentrum of the University of Basel specializes in basic molecular and biomedical research and teaching. Research includes the areas of cell growth and development, infection biology, neurobiology, structural biology and biophysics, and computational and systems biology. With more than 550 employees, the Biozentrum is the largest department at the University of Basel's Faculty of Science. It is home to 30 research groups with scientists from 45 nations.
Erik van Nimwegen is a Dutch computational biologist and Professor at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, Switzerland.
In bioinformatics, a Gene Disease Database is a systematized collection of data, typically structured to model aspects of reality, in a way to comprehend the underlying mechanisms of complex diseases, by understanding multiple composite interactions between phenotype-genotype relationships and gene-disease mechanisms. Gene Disease Databases integrate human gene-disease associations from various expert curated databases and text mining derived associations including Mendelian, complex and environmental diseases.
The Centre for Genomic Regulation is a biomedical and genomics research centre based on Barcelona. Most of its facilities and laboratories are located in the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park, in front of Somorrostro beach.
Genome Informatics is a scientific study of information processing in genomes.
