Understanding biology through bioinformatics

Abstract

During the journey from the discovery of DNA to be the source of genetic information and elucidation of double-helical nature of DNA molecule to the assembly of human genome sequence and there after, bioinformatics has become an integral part of modern biology. Bioinformatics relies substantially on significant contributions made by scientists in various fields, including but not limited to, linguistics, biology, mathematics, computer science, and statistics. There is an ever increasing amount of data to elucidate toxic mechanisms and/or adverse effects of xenobiotics in the field of toxicogenomics. Annotation in combination with various bioinformatics analytical tools can play a crucial role in the understanding of genes and proteins, and can potentially help draw meaningful conclusions from various data sources. This article attempts to present a simple overview of bioinformatics, and an effort is made to discuss annotation.