Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, chemistry, physics, computer science, computer programming, information engineering, mathematics and statistics to analyze and interpret biological data. The subsequent process of analyzing and interpreting data is referred to as computational biology.
In the fields of molecular biology and genetics, a genome is all the genetic information of an organism. It consists of nucleotide sequences of DNA. The nuclear genome includes protein-coding genes and non-coding genes, other functional regions of the genome such as regulatory sequences, and often a substantial fraction of junk DNA with no evident function. Almost all eukaryotes have mitochondria and a small mitochondrial genome. Algae and plants also contain chloroplasts with a chloroplast genome.
Symbiosis is any type of a close and long-term biological interaction between two biological organisms of different species, termed symbionts, be it mutualistic, commensalistic, or parasitic. In 1879, Heinrich Anton de Bary defined it as "the living together of unlike organisms". The term is sometimes used in the more restricted sense of a mutually beneficial interaction in which both symbionts contribute to each other's support.
Symbiogenesis is the leading evolutionary theory of the origin of eukaryotic cells from prokaryotic organisms. The theory holds that mitochondria, plastids such as chloroplasts, and possibly other organelles of eukaryotic cells are descended from formerly free-living prokaryotes taken one inside the other in endosymbiosis. Mitochondria appear to be phylogenetically related to Rickettsiales bacteria, while chloroplasts are thought to be related to cyanobacteria.
Lamarckism, also known as Lamarckian inheritance or neo-Lamarckism, is the notion that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime. It is also called the inheritance of acquired characteristics or more recently soft inheritance. The idea is named after the French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), who incorporated the classical era theory of soft inheritance into his theory of evolution as a supplement to his concept of orthogenesis, a drive towards complexity.
The glaucophytes, also known as glaucocystophytes or glaucocystids, are a small group of unicellular algae found in freshwater and moist terrestrial environments, less common today than they were during the Proterozoic. The stated number of species in the group varies from about 14 to 26. Together with the red algae (Rhodophyta) and the green algae plus land plants, they form the Archaeplastida.
Genetic variation is the difference in DNA among individuals or the differences between populations. The multiple sources of genetic variation include mutation and genetic recombination. Mutations are the ultimate sources of genetic variation, but other mechanisms, such as genetic drift, contribute to it, as well.
Genome Research is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. Disregarding review journals, Genome Research ranks 2nd in the category 'Genetics and Genomics' after Nature Genetics. The focus of the journal is on research that provides novel insights into the genome biology of all organisms, including advances in genomic medicine. This scope includes genome structure and function, comparative genomics, molecular evolution, genome-scale quantitative and population genetics, proteomics, epigenomics, and systems biology. The journal also features interesting gene discoveries and reports of cutting-edge computational biology and high-throughput biology methodologies. New data in these areas are published as research papers, or methods and resource reports that provide novel information on technologies or tools that will be of interest to a broad readership. The journal was established in 1991 as PCR Methods and Applications and obtained its current title in 1995. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2020 impact factor of 9.043, which peaked in 2014 at 14.630.
In biology, the word gene can have several different meanings. The Mendelian gene is a basic unit of heredity and the molecular gene is a sequence of nucleotides in DNA that is transcribed to produce a functional RNA. There are two types of molecular genes: protein-coding genes and noncoding genes.
Masatoshi Nei was a Japanese-born American evolutionary biologist.
Denis Noble is a British physiologist and biologist who held the Burdon Sanderson Chair of Cardiovascular Physiology at the University of Oxford from 1984 to 2004 and was appointed Professor Emeritus and co-Director of Computational Physiology. He is one of the pioneers of systems biology and developed the first viable mathematical model of the working heart in 1960.
Molecular Biology and Evolution is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. It publishes work in the intersection of molecular biology and evolutionary biology. The founding editors-in-chief were Walter Fitch and Masatoshi Nei; the present editor-in-chief is Sudhir Kumar.
Takashi Gojobori is a Japanese molecular biologist, Vice-Director of the National Institute of Genetics (NIG) and the DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) at NIG, in Mishima, Japan. Gojobori is a Distinguished Professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. He is a Professor of Bioscience and Acting Director at the Computational Bioscience Research Center at KAUST.
John A. Dupré is a British philosopher of science. He is the director of Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences, and professor of philosophy at the University of Exeter. Dupré's chief work area lies in philosophy of biology, philosophy of the social sciences, and general philosophy of science. Dupré, together with Nancy Cartwright, Ian Hacking, Patrick Suppes and Peter Galison, are often grouped together as the "Stanford School" of philosophy of science. In 2023, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Diethard Tautz is a German biologist and geneticist, who is primarily concerned with the molecular basis of the evolution of mammals. Since 2006 he is director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön.
The Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE) is a scientific and academic organization founded in 1982 to support academic research in the field of molecular evolution. The society hosts an annual meeting, typically in June or July. It also supports satellite meetings throughout the year. The Society's first president was evolutionary biologist Walter M. Fitch. The current President is James McInerney.
Daniel Mier Gusfield is an American computer scientist, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis. Gusfield is known for his research in combinatorial optimization and computational biology.
Edward David Penny CNZM FRSNZ is a theoretical and evolutionary biologist from New Zealand. He has researched the nature of evolutionary transformations, and is widely published in the fields of phylogenetic tree, genetics and evolutionary biology. Penny's contributions to science have been recognised with several awards and honours, and acceptance into the National Academy of Sciences.
Emma Caroline Teeling is an Irish zoologist, geneticist and genomicist, who specialises in the phylogenetics and genomics of bats. Her work includes understanding of the bat genome and study of how insights from other mammals such as bats might contribute to better understanding and management of ageing and a number of conditions, including deafness and blindness, in humans. She is the co-founder of the Bat1K project to map the genomes of all species of bat. She is also concerned with understanding of the places of bats in the environment and how to conserve their ecosystem.
Adam C. Eyre-Walker, is a British evolutionary geneticist, currently Professor of Biology in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Sussex. He is noted for making "significant contributions to our understanding of evolution at the molecular level" and pioneering the use of DNA sequence databases for extracting information about the evolution of genomes.
