Everything you need to know about bioinformatics. Some of the most important questions are as follows:-
Q.1. When was HGP (Human genome project) started?
Ans: Human genome project was started in 1987.
Q.2. What is Bioinformatics?
Ans: Bioinformatics is an integrated field, which combines computational, mathematical and statical methods to manage and analyze the biological data or information.
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Bioinformatics is the management and analysis of biological information’s contained in biological databases.
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Bioinformatics is a new subject of genetic information collection, analysis, and dissemination to the research community.
Q.3. Which are the main sub-disciplines of bioinformatics?
Ans: There are three main sub-disciplines within bioinformatics:
a. To develop, new algorithms and statical methods which may be used to access the relationships among information’s present in large databases.
b. To analyze and interpret various types of information, which include nucleic acid and amino acid sequences with protein structures and protein domains.
c. To develop new computer tools that enable efficient access and management of different types of biological information.
Q.4. What is medical-informatics?
Ans: Medical-informatics is a new field, which is used by physicians to manage and analyze clinical information contained in hospital database.
Q.5. Which types of issues or problems related to biological data are dealt with the bioinformatics?
Ans: Mainly, bioinformatics deals with development of data analysis tools, molecular modelling of various biological macromolecules in two dimensional and three dimensional structures, metabolic pathways, in pharmaceutical industries to develop new drug molecules, peptide vaccines, proteins etc.
Q.6. What is the main role of a bioinformatician in present biological research and development area?
Ans: The main role a bioinformatician is to create a framework that can support the needs of information based R&D for biological research.
Q.7. Why do we move towards the use of bioinformatics?
Ans: There are many reasons, that provide support to the use of bioinformatics such as:
a. For handling the biological data and manage it in such a way to give more meaningful information with the help of highly sophisticated computers.
b. To communicate among people, projects, and institutions engaged in biological R&D and applications.
c. To organize, give access and retrieving facility of biological information, documents and literature.
d. To analyze and interpret biological data through the computational facilities.
Q.8. Which type of skills are required to be a good bioinformatician?
Ans: To be a good bioinformatician, it is necessary to have a sound knowledge of molecular biology, biochemistry, molecular biophysics, molecular modelling, computer, information technology, and biostatistics. Beside, a bioinformatics professional must understand the central dogma of molecular biology and bioinformatics software packages.
Q.9. Why dry lab term is used for defining bioinformatics?
Ans: The meaning of dry lab is related to work without any type of chemicals, solutions in laboratory conditions. Bioinformatics mainly relate to work with computer and internet to analyze the biological information that is present on internet servers in different databases, due to these specific requirements dry lab term is used for defining the bioinformatics.
Q.10. What is data mining?
Ans: Discovery and retrieving of required data from different databases is known as data mining.
Q.11. What is KDD?
Ans: Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) is an emerging field combining the theoretical and practical issues of extracting high level information from volume of low level data.
Q.12. How the term bioinformaticist is different from bioinformatician?
Ans: A bioinformaticist is an expert who knows how to use bioinformatics tools as well as to write interface for effective use of the tools. While a bioinformatician is a trained individual who only knows to use bioinformatics tools without having the knowledge of its construction.
Q.13. What is integrative bioinformatics?
Ans: The study of informative processes in biotic systems is known as integrative bioinformatics. In other words the high throughput interpretation of biological pathways is known as integrative bioinformatics.
Q.14. Define term database.
Ans: Database is the combination of same type of information or files that are collectively called as database.
Q.15. What is OMIM?
Ans: OMIM is a database that provides all the information about the human inheritance. The complete meaning of OMIM is Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man.
Q.16. Which type of databases are used in bioinformatics?
Ans: There are more than 200 databases which are used in bioinformatics but the main categories of database relate to annoyed database, curated database, federated databases, integrated databases, interoperability databases, non-redundant databases, proprietary databases, redundant databases, relational databases, in-depth flat files and indexed flat files.
Q.17. What is federated database?
Ans: Federated database is an integrated repository information of multiple data sources presented with consistent and coherent semantics.
Q.18. What is interoperability?
Ans: The ability of different platforms of computers, networks, operating systems and applications to work effectively, without prior communication in order to exchange the information in a useful and meaningful manner is known as interoperability.
Q.19. What is non-redundant database?
Ans: A database that has redundant entries present in merged condition. These entries are typically those that are 100% character by character identical.
Q.20. What is complementarity?
Ans: The sequence specific or shape specific recognition that occurs when two or more molecules binds together.
Q.21. What is consensus sequence?
Ans: The most commonly occurring amino acid or nucleotide at each position of an aligned series of proteins or polynucleotide is known as consensus sequence.
Q.22. Define the consensus map.
Ans: The location of all consensus sequences in a series of multiple aligned proteins or polynucleotide is called the consensus map.
Q.23. What do you understand by the term-conserved sequence?
Ans: Conserved sequence is a sequence present in DNA or Protein that is consistent across species or has remained unchanged within the species over its evolutionary changes.
Q.24. What are proprietary databases?
Ans: These are a charge subscription type database, which require fees to access those on commercial level, such as LifeSeq and Gene Logic’s.
Q.25. Define redundant databases.
Ans: In general, the primary type database is known as redundant databases or when sequences were first created in the database is called as redundant database.
Q.26. Define the following terms.
Ans: a. Allele: Different forms of a gene, which occupy the same position on the chromosome.
b. Amplification: The process of repeatedly making copies of the same piece of DNA.
c. BAC (Bacterial artificial chromosome): A long sequencing vector, which is created from a bacterial chromosome by splicing a DNA fragment of 100kb from another species.
d. Base pair: The complementary bases on opposite strands of DNA which are held together by hydrogen bonding.
e. Beauty : BEAUTY or BLAST enhanced alignment utility, a tool developed by Baylor College of Medicine which uses BLAST to search several custom databases and incorporates sequence family information, location of conserved domains and information about any annotated sited or domains directly into the BLAST query results.
f. Blocks: a database of un-gapped multiple alignments for protein or peptide families in PROSITE.
Q.27. What is search engine?
Ans: A search engine is a type of utility or tools, which provide facility to retrieve information from different databases. In general life we use many search engines such as Goggle, Rediff and Yahoo but for bioinformatics there are mainly two search engines BLAST and FASTA.
Q.28. What is BLAST?
Ans: Basic local alignment searching tool, used to find out the queried sequence from different databases of protein, DNA, RNA etc..