A transposable element is a nucleic acid sequence in DNA that can change its position within a genome, sometimes creating or reversing mutations and altering the cell's genetic identity and genome size. Transposition often results in duplication of the same genetic material. In the human genome, L1 and Alu elements are two examples. Barbara McClintock's discovery of them earned her a Nobel Prize in 1983. Its importance in personalized medicine is becoming increasingly relevant, as well as gaining more attention in data analytics given the difficulty of analysis in very high dimensional spaces.
Genomics is an interdisciplinary field of molecular 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 as well as its hierarchical, three-dimensional structural configuration. 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 refers to the use of data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and big data, the field also has foundations in applied mathematics, chemistry, and genetics. It differs from biological computing, a subfield of computer science and engineering which uses bioengineering to build computers.
An Alu element is a short stretch of DNA originally characterized by the action of the Arthrobacter luteus (Alu) restriction endonuclease. Alu elements are the most abundant transposable elements in the human genome, present in excess of one million copies. Alu elements were thought to be selfish or parasitic DNA, because their sole known function is self reproduction. However, they are likely to play a role in evolution and have been used as genetic markers. They are derived from the small cytoplasmic 7SL RNA, a component of the signal recognition particle. Alu elements are highly conserved within primate genomes and originated in the genome of an ancestor of Supraprimates.
Eugene Viktorovich Koonin is a Russian-American biologist and Senior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). He is a recognised expert in the field of evolutionary and computational biology.
Michael Ashburner was an English biologist and Professor in the Department of Genetics at University of Cambridge. He was also the former joint-head and co-founder of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.
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.
The Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics is a research institute for molecular genetics based in Berlin, Germany. It is part of the Max Planck Institute network of the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science.
In the fields of bioinformatics and computational biology, Genome survey sequences (GSS) are nucleotide sequences similar to expressed sequence tags (ESTs) that the only difference is that most of them are genomic in origin, rather than mRNA.
Eugene Wimberly "Gene" Myers, Jr. is an American computer scientist and bioinformatician, who is best known for contributing to the early development of the NCBI's BLAST tool for sequence analysis.
Mark Borodovsky is a Regents' Professor at the Join Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering of Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University and Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics at Georgia Tech. He has also been a Chair of the Department of Bioinformatics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in Moscow, Russia from 2012 to 2022.
Garib Mammadov is an Azerbaijani politician. He served on the National Assembly of Azerbaijan.
Pavel Arkadevich Pevzner is the Ronald R. Taylor Professor of Computer Science and director of the NIH Center for Computational Mass Spectrometry at University of California, San Diego. He serves on the editorial board of PLoS Computational Biology and he is a member of the Genome Institute of Singapore scientific advisory board.
Alfonso Valencia is a Spanish biologist, ICREA Professor, current director of the Life Sciences department at Barcelona Supercomputing Center., of Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute (INB-ISCIII), and coordinator of the data pillar of the Spanish Personalised Medicine initiative, IMPaCT. From 2015-2018, he was President of the International Society for Computational Biology.
Gary Stormo is an American geneticist and currently Joseph Erlanger Professor in the Department of Genetics and the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis. He is considered one of the pioneers of bioinformatics and genomics. His research combines experimental and computational approaches in order to identify and predict regulatory sequences in DNA and RNA, and their contributions to the regulatory networks that control gene expression.
Victor V. Solovyev is the chief scientific officer of Softberry Inc. He was previously a professor of computer science in the Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering Division at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) (2013-2015) and in the Department of Computer Science at Royal Holloway College, University of London (2003-2012). He was on the editorial board of Mathematical Biosciences and was a founder of Softberry Inc..
Martin Vingron is an Austrian mathematician working in the fields of bioinformatics and computational biology. Since 2000, he has been Director of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics.
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gelfand is a Russian Bioinformaticist and molecular biologist. He is a member of Academia Europaea, Vice President Biomedical Research of Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, one of the founder of Dissernet plagiarism fighting society and a political activist, former member of Russian Opposition Coordination Council. He is a grandson of a prominent Soviet mathematician Israel Gelfand.
Nagima Abenovna Aitkhozhina was a Kazakh biologist who specialised in the field of molecular biology. She was engaged in the study of the structural and functional organisation of the genome of higher organisms and the molecular mechanisms of regulation of its expression. Aitkhozhina served as general director of the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry named after M.A. Aitkhozhin of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Kazakhstan from 1990 to 2018, Kazakhstan's first genome laboratory. Between 1999 and 2002, she was president of the Kazakhstan Academy of Sciences. Aitkhozhina was an elected deputy of the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union from the Committee of Soviet Women from 1989 to 1991. She was decorated with the Order of Parasat in December 2001 and the Order of the Leopard, Third Class ten years later.
