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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.
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
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.
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
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
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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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What
is Bioinformatics?
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