BioInformatics
by Nuno Barreto
SHiFT08

What this presentation is
• A general description of what
bioinformatics is
• A voyage in most aspects involved
• A view of the technologies used
• A view of the future

What this presentation is
not
• An exhaustive explanation of what
Bioinformatics is

Bioinformatics?

Bioinformatics
=
Molecular Biology + IT

So, that excludes other
interesting applications of IT in
the Biology related fields

The democratization of Biological Information

Geographic information systems

So...
What is Bioinformatics?
What is it used for?
Why has it changed the face of Biology?

It’s all about DNA

• DNA is a nucleic acid that contains a
“blueprint”
• This “blueprint” is used to construct every
part of the organism, it is all Nature needs
to reproduce an organism and keep it
functioning correctly

image from Wikipedia

How is it captured?

Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/gravitywave/7715395/

Image from http://www.dna11.com

images from Wikipedia

image from Wikipedia

Made at http://www.baekdal.com/web2dna

In fact, it’s all about String Manipulation
image from Wikipedia

Alignment of 27 avian influenza hemagglutinin protein
sequences
image from Wikipedia

Genomes

• Genomes are the complete set of
chromosomes of organism, which contain
its full DNA
• It includes genes
• Delimitations
• And also “junk DNA”

Genes
• “a gene is a portion of an organism's DNA
which contains both \"coding\" sequences
that determine what the gene does, and
\"non-coding\" sequences that determine
when the gene is active” (from Wikipedia)

image from Wikipedia

Human Genome
• 23 chromosome
pairs
• 3.2 billion DNA
base pairs
• 20 500 genes
image from Wikipedia

Chicken Genome
• 1 billion DNA base
pairs
• 20-23 000 genes
Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/31562846/

Amoeba dubia Genome
• 670 billion DNA
base pairs
photo from www.behav.org/GENE/org/org_040_C.htm

Only 79 eukaryotic genomes
Only ~400 prokaryotic genomes
Only 27 archaeal genomes

Still a lot of genomes to be sequenced,
considering the 1.8 million classified species,
and the possibility of existing 10 to 100 million unknown.

Proteomics

• It’s all about discovering the sets of
proteins of an organism, knowing it’s
function

Protein Folding

• RNA is the blueprint of Proteins
• Proteins structure is very important for it’s
functioning
• Therefore, it is crucial to know its shape in
order to know its function

Protein Folding
image from Wikipedia

Hemoglobin
image from Wikipedia

Folding @home
http://folding.stanford.edu/

Tree of Life

All info available through websites

http://www.uniprot.org

http://www.ebi.ac.uk/Tools/clustalw2/index.html

What can we do with all this
information?

Better understand all organisms

Most importantly,
we can understand our bodies better

It is a great advancement in
medicine

• Helps in disease diagnosis and prevention
• Helps understand our response to
treatments, creating the possibility of
customized ones
• Identification of drug targets
• Gene Therapy

Future

• More advances in specific treatment
• A better comprehension of our bodies
• A better comprehension of the
relationships between organisms
• Who knows? :)

nbarreto@gmail.com