Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field that uses computational tools and deals with large and complex biological datasets. It involves retrieving, storing, organizing, analyzing, or visualizing these biological data. To be able to analyze and predict biological data, Bioinformatics overlaps with biology, computer science, mathematics, information engineering, and statistics.

Bioinformatics plays many major roles in Biology. In genetics, it helps in the sequencing & annotation of genomes, analysis of genes, expression of proteins, etc. All of this comes handy in the understanding of evolutionary aspects of molecular biology, once a bioinformatician works with different tools built particularly for these purposes i.e. aligning/comparing, analyzing, and then predicting or interpreting the genomic data.

 

Bioinformatics Vs Computational Biology:

Most of the time people assume that Bioinformatics and Computational Biology are the same things. Before completely comprehending the area of Bioinformatics, one should know the difference between both of them. Their major difference is in their practice. 

As mentioned earlier, bioinformatics is more about utilizing the biological data and expanding one’s skills to deal with these biological data by database and software development. One more major thing required from a bioinformatician is to manage, visualize, and analyze this biological data so some substantial information can be extracted out from them. 

Unlike Bioinformatics, computational biology revolves around the development of mathematical models, computational algorithms, and statistical evaluations of complex biological data or systems. It mainly focuses on the computational side of the biological problem-solving. 

 

Bioinformatics’ Impact:

Analysis and interpretation of these large & complex datasets have revolutionized due to bioinformatics and that’s what makes the area of bioinformatics vast and very diverse. Following are some of the major areas that a bioinformatician impact:

• Analyzing and interpreting genomic data/sequences that go through sequence assembly and annotation. By comparing and analyzing these biological sequences can give information related to particular specie/s. 

• Comparing these biological datasets help in comprehending the evolutionary basis of organisms, predicting speciation, allows the study of complex evolutionary events, etc.

• Measuring the mRNA levels through various techniques is the basics for understanding the expression of genes and proteins. 

• These practices are targeting personalized medicine and specific diseases, such as cancer. Cancer Bioinformatics playing an important role in the identification and validation of network to dynamic network biomarkers. 

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How to become a bioinformatician?

Not only a bioinformatician works with tools to analyze and interpret the biological data but also work on developing these tools. To become a bioinformatician, one should have skills in sequence alignment, genome analysis, structure prediction, phylogenetic analysis, computer scripting for software development skills, etc.

So, if you want to develop your skills in any area of bioinformatics, you can join BioCode’s Gray Bioinformatics plans at a very affordable price. You can be an expert in analyzing any biological data, by learning from our various useful & informative tutorials on the tools & databases involved in analyzing the biological data or join our Gold or Gem Bioinformatics plan to develop your skills in computer scripting and develop programs/ tools. 

BioCode provides an interactive platform to learn biological programming in Python & R,  bioinformatics techniques, tools, databases, and biological data analysis in an interactive manner covering both theoretical and practical aspects of the computational biology topics; an interactive platform where fun meets work and you learn at your own pace, without being time-constrained.

To join our Bioinformatics plans, visit BioCode, and enroll yourself to develop your skills in bioinformatics.