Bioinformatics
BIOTECHNOLOGY
BIOINFORMATICS IN
AP.9
What is biotechnology?
The goal of biotechnology is to improve the quality of human life by utilizing biological systems or living organisms in order to develop products for a specific use. Biotechnology has been used to improve agriculture, food production, and medicine. Biotechnology uses bioinformatics for exploration, extraction, exploitation and production from any living organisms and any source of biomass by means of biochemical engineering.
BT.1
What role does bioinformaticsplay in biotechnology?
Bioinformatics has made major contribution towards gene sequencing including development of automated sequencing techniques that integrate the PCR or BAC based amplification, 2D gel electrophoresis and automated reading of nucleotides. Bioinformatics has also allowed for the sequences of smaller fragments together to form a complete genome sequence.
BT.2
GENOME SEQUENCING
Scientists are able to use bioinformatics for an automated reconstruction and comparison of pathways of newly sequence organisms .The three major approaches can be classified as: (i) global network of reactions catalyzed by enzymes, (2) network of gene-groups connected through the reactions catalyzed by enzymes embedded in the gene-groups, (3) global modeling of chemical reactions in the microbial cells.
BT.5
RECONSTRUCTING METABOLIC PATWAYS
After forming a complete genome sequence, one of the main issues is to identify the protein code readings in genomes. With bioinformatics, scientists are able to use algorithms based on decision trees that identify start codons and stop codons of the coding regions. Scientists can also use databases such as GenBank to identify genes.
BT.3
AUTOMATED IDENTIFICATION OF GENES
After identifying the protein coding regions, the next step is to annotate the genes with proper structure and function.
BT.6
IDENTIFYING GENE FUNCTION
3D structures from X-ray crystallography and NMR spectroscopy are limited. Because of this, an alternate mechanism is needed to match genes. One of the major approaches to a 3D model is to sequence the homolgy based prediction.
BT.4
3D STRUCTURE MODELING
After scientists identify the gene function, the next step is to do pair-wise genome comparisons. Pair-wise genome comparisons of a genome against other genomes have been used to identify different types of gene groups, and more.
BT.7