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The Bioinformatics Center at Rensselaer and Wadsworth focuses its work on collaboration and training in a rapidly developing new field of biological science - Bioinformatics. It unites the world renowned specialists in the field of bioinformatics and facilitates joint research, recruitment of scientists, and education of future Bioinformatics specialists. >>more
 

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We offer bioinformatics software applications to the international scientific community, showcase research done by our members and present the latest information on Bioinformatics courses and educational programs offered by RPI.

What is Bioinformatics?

Although everyone agrees that Bioinformatics is undergoing explosive growth, not everyone agrees on the uniform definition of this discipline. Below we present several definitions and reference links discussing bioinformatics.

National Center for Biotechnology information
 
Bioinformatics is the field of science in which biology, computer science, and information technology merge into a single discipline. The ultimate goal of the field is to enable the discovery of new biological insights as well as to create a global perspective from which unifying principles in biology can be discerned.>>More

NIH Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative Consortium (in PDF format)
Research, development, or application of computational tools and approaches for expanding the use of biological, medical, behavioral or health data, including those to acquire, store, organize, archive, analyze, or visualize such data. Computational Biology:The development and application of data-analytical and theoretical methods, mathematical modeling and computational simulation techniques to the study of biological, behavioral, and social systems.

HMS Beagle, article by R.W. Wallace
Bioinformatics has emerged as a distinct discipline that straddles the interface between the traditional biological sciences and the computer sciences and advanced computational methodologies. It is rapidly becoming a powerful new approach to understanding life, and it may well reverse the reductionist paradigm that has held sway in molecular biology ever since Erwin Schrodinger turned on a generation of physicists to biology with the publication of What is Life? more than 50 years ago.>>More

Bioinformatics Frequently Asked Questions, maintained by Damian Councel
Roughly, bioinformatics describes any use of computers to handle biological information. In practice the definition used by most people is narrower; bioinformatics to them is a synonym for "computational molecular biology"--- the use of computers to characterize the molecular components of living things. >>More

Comments  

National Center for Biotechnology information - What is bioinformatics?
A narrow definition of Bioinformatics that is close to our own, except that it doesn't mention mathematics." -- M.Z.

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Bioinformatics in the Rensselaer Plan

As stated in President Shirley Jackson's Rensselaer Plan, "our ambitious goal: to secure Rensselaer’s place as a world-class technological research university for a new century". Bioinformatics is part of this global and progressive endeavor, and spans bioscience, biotechnology and information technology. >>More
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Useful Links  

Careers

On careers in Bioinformatics, The Scientist, article by K.Y. Kreeger
The rush to sequence -- and ultimately interpret--the genomes of humans and other species is driving the demand for researchers in certain key areas of the life sciences. >>More

Books

•   FetchBook.info - browse and compare prices for books related to bioinformatics

Resources

•   NCBI PubMed - access over 12 million MEDLINE citations and life science journals

•   RCSB Protein Data Bank - "the single worldwide repository for the processing and distribution of 3-D biological macromolecular structure data"

•   BLAST - "a set of similarity search programs designed to explore all of the available sequence databases regardless of whether the query is protein or DNA"

•   FASTA - sequence similarity search of your protein query

•   PROSITE - database of protein families and domains

•   DALI - 3d comparison of protein structures

Societies

•   NIH - National Institues of Health

•   DOE - US Department of Energy

•   IUCr - International Union of Crystallography

•   NSF - National Science Foundation

Magazines

•   Bioinformatics - "The leading journal in its field, Bioinformatics publishes the highest quality scientific papers and review articles of interest to academic and industrial researchers. >>More

•   BioSystems - "... encourages experimental, computational, and theoretical articles that link biology, evolutionary thinking, and the information processing sciences."

•   JAMIA - Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association

•   Computers in Biology and Medicine - "This journal is a medium of international communication on the revolutionary advances being made in the application of the computer to the fields of biomedical engineering and medical informatics."

 

 

 

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