A TEXT BOOK OF BIOINFORMATICS

The bioinformatics has emerged as the most exciting branch of science in the twenty-first century. In the past ten years we have witnessed generation of enormous data in biological sciences primarily through the genome sequencing projects including the genome of Homo sapiens. How to store, manage and interpret such a huge wealth of data became one of the most challenging tasks for biotechnologists. This necessitated the application of the skills and knowledge of computer science in the management and interpretation of the information contained in the linear strings of A, T, G and C. Thus a highly interdisciplinary and rapidly growing distinct discipline, bioinformatics was bom. In a nutshell, bioinformatics deals with development and application of computational tools to acquire, store, organize, retrieve, analyze and predict biological data. However besides computational tools, bioinformatics also takes benefits from various other disciplines viz. statistics, mathematics, biophysics, chemistry and so on, not merely to unravel the mysteries of the raw sequence data, but also to undertake novel and innovative approaches in other important areas such as drug designing and development etc.