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Cell Biology

Learn the toughest concepts covered in Cell Biology with step-by-step video tutorials and practice problems by world-class tutors

22. Techniques in Cell Biology

Bioinformatics

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Bioinformatics

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Hi in this video, I'm gonna be talking to you about bioinformatics. So bioinformatics is just a combination of computer science and biology that allows scientists to evaluate a lot of data. So for instance you D. N. A. Sequence the entire genome of an organism that's going to generate a lot of data a lot of information. And so bioinformatics is the process of helping to organize and analyze that data so we can actually get something out of it. So one example of this that you may have heard about or probably will hear about soon is the basic local alignment tool. It's called blast for short. So this is a software that if you have a D. N. A sequence or an RNA sequence or a protein sequence you can put that sequence in and it'll come up with everything that has the every sequence that's really close to it no matter the organism. So if you get A. D. N. A sequence and you're like I don't know what this sequence is, I don't know what geniuses. You can put it in blast and it'll say this is this gene from this organism and it's 99.999% the same sequence. So this is super important. It can identify what jean you're looking at. It can look at conservation among different organisms. And it can also look at the variation of genes and human populations then you have transcript O. Mix. So this is going to be looking at the entire set of RNA molecules produced by the cell at any time. And obviously this is going to change our cells are constantly producing new genes over time. And so at every second and every minute the transcript a mix of a cell is going to be different. And so by trying to take all that data in, imagine if you've tried to examine what the transcripts are in every single cell and every single minute of your life, that's a ton of data. So although we don't do that, we do something similar and we need bioinformatics to examine that data. And then you have proteome or proteomics and this is going to be the entire set of structural and functional properties of every protein produced by genome. So we have as humans we have 25,000 around 20-25,000 um protein coding regions. So that super. And then many of those also can be spliced differently, made differently, have modifications on them. And so all of that data has to be taken in by bioinformatics. Right. And say, Okay, well this protein has 17 different modifications That can happen in each one of these, 17 do this and this protein for all of our proteins and all of all these organisms proteins that we are interested in research. So it's a super important field. I don't really have an image for you because it's a lot of data and computer science but it is really important in taking all this vast data and organizing it in a way that we can actually do something with it. So with that let's sounds fun.
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