Bioinformatics analyzes massive amounts of biological data like DNA sequences to uncover hidden biological information. It has many applications like molecular medicine, drug development, and microbial genome analysis. Common bioinformatics tools like BLAST are used to compare query sequences against databases to find similar sequences. BLAST works through a heuristic algorithm that finds short matches between sequences to locate potential homologs in an efficient manner. Other algorithms like Smith-Waterman and FASTA also perform sequence alignment but with different tradeoffs in accuracy and speed.

1. BIOINFORMATICS Arushi Dinesh Kasi Shruthi 1

3. Massive DNA sequencing projects have evolved and added in the growth of the science of bioinformatics.

4. The ultimate goal of bioinformatics is to uncover the wealth of biological information hidden in the mass of sequence, structure, literature and other biological data2

5. introduction 3

6. bioinformatics 4

7. bioinformatics 5

8. bioinformatics 6

9. Components of Bioinformatics 7

10. What is done in bioinformatics? 8

11. Why use Bioinformatics? 9

13. Personalized medicine

14. Preventative medicine

15. Gene therapy

16. Drug development

17. Microbial genome applications

18. Waste cleanup

19. Climate change Studies

20. Alternative energy sources

21. Biotechnology 10

23. Forensic analysis of microbes

24. Bio-weapon creation

25. Evolutionary studies

26. Crop improvement

27. Insect resistance

28. Improve nutritional quality

29. Development of Drought resistance varieties

30. Veterinary Science 11

32. The computational biology tool best-known among biologists is probably BLAST, an algorithm for determining the similarity of arbitrary sequences against other sequences, possibly from curated databases of protein or DNA sequences.

34. It is an algorithm for comparing biological sequences information, such as amino acid sequence of different proteins or the nucleotides of DNA sequences.

35. BLAST is used to identify library sequences that resembles the query sequences.

36. The BLAST program was designed by Eugene Myers, StephenAltschul, Warren Gish, David J. Lipman and WebbMiller at the NIH and was published in J. Mol. Biol. in 1990.13

38. Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST/14

40. Linux

41. Mac

42. MS-Windows

43. IBM AIX 5.115

44. 16

45. 17

46. 18

52. While attempting to find homology in sequences, sets of common letters, known as words. 22

55. The heuristic algorithm of BLAST locates all common words between the sequences of interest (query) and the hit sequences (sequences from database). 23

59. This method varies from the BLAST method in two areas, accuracy and speed.

60. A better alternative in order to find the best possible results.

61. It is more time consuming.26

63. FASTA package contains programs for protein: protein, DNA:DNA, protein : translated DNA , and ordered or unordered peptide searches.

64. A major focus of the package is the calculation of accurate similarity statistics, so that biologists can judge whether an alignment is likely to have occurred by chance.27

65. Conclusion 28