Bioinformatics Essay

1 Chapter 1

1.1 Introduction

1.2 Bioinformatics

The general definition of bioinformatics is a field that uses advanced information and computational techniques to solve complex problems in molecular biology. Bioinformatics uses these advanced computational techniques to manage and extract useful information form the DNA, RNA and protein sequence data being generated and stored in large databases. Certain methods for analysing genomes and protein data have been found to be extremely computationally intensive, providing the need for the use of powerful computers.

In summary, bioinformatics involves the creation of databases algorithms and computational techniques for solving problems in molecular biology and has many practical applications (Luscombe et al. n.d.).

1.2.1 Bioinformatics Research Areas

Bioinformatics is a multi-discipline field of study which include computer science, statistics, mathematics to develop algorithms and systems that are capable of solving molecular biology problems .The primary goal of bioinformatics is to understand and solve complex molecular biology problems. This goal can be achieved by developing and also applying computational techniques and information storage, such as data mining, HCP algorithms and database creation. All these techniques are meant to support multiple areas of scientific research including:

 Sequence analysis: these are biological sequence such as DNA, RNA, and protein sequence which are the most fundamental object for a biological system at the molecular level (Rhee & Dickerson 2006). There are tools that are used to extract useful information from these sequences and make meaningful.

 Genome annotation: it is a process of attaching biological information to DNA sequences. T...

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...g was the solution to all of the problems. Below there are a set of objectives that will be done on the thesis.

 Objective 1– Investigate the evolution of sequence alignment algorithms.

 Objective 2 – design a timeline for the sequence alignment algorithms

 Objective 3– Investigate the High performance computing techniques.

 Objective 4– Design and construct cluster for evaluation of the sequence alignment algorithm.

 Objective 5– testing of the performance of the cluster environment.

1.7 Expected results

The main goal of this thesis is to address the need of high performance computing in the field of bioinformatics. A detailed timeline of the sequence alignment algorithms will be presented. The need for high performance computing will be showed by a series of experiments where will be comparing the performance of a personal computer against cluster computer.