The Exploding New Field

BIOINFORMATICS..... The lethal combination

Bioinformatics is the latest new discipline of Bioscience which merges Biology, Computer Science, Mathematics & Statistics with forecasting and modeling capacity. The science of Bioinformatics is essential to the use of genomic information to understand human diseases & to identify new molecular target for drug discovery.Source:  http://biotechspectrum.blogspot.com 

Its vertical growth is the result of vast pool of talents available in Computers as well as Bioscience in India.

Bio-informatics is the recording, annotation, storage, analysis, and searching/retrieval of nucleic acid sequence (genes and RNAs), protein sequence and structural information. This includes databases of the sequences and structural information as well methods to access, search, visualize and retrieve the information. Bio-informatics 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. In the last few decades, advances in molecular biology and the equipment available for research in this field have allowed the increasingly rapid sequencing of large portions of the genomes of several species. Popular sequence databases, such as GenBank and EMBL, have been growing at exponential rates. This deluge of information has necessitated the careful storage, organization and indexing of sequence information. Information science has been applied to biology to produce the field called bio-informatics.

Why is it hot?
Its upright growth is an outcome of its vast application in the field of Genomics Proteomics and Drug design. To reduce the time expense and man power Bioinformatics can increase efficiency for solving biological problem.

CAREER PROSPECTS   Source:  http://biotechspectrum.blogspot.com 
With Indian economy developing according to the world pace & Clinical Research works flowing in India, large Bioinformatics R&D divisions are set up by many Pharma, IT & Biotech companies especially in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai & Delhi. More than 300 companies are functional in various activities such as Biodiversity & Environment, Cloning of higher animals such as Dolly & Polly. Tissue Culture, Pharmacogenomics, Pharmacology, Computational Chemistry, Plants Cloning & Simulations in Drug Discovery. IT majors such as Reliance Bioscience, Accerly's, Schrodinger, Johnson & Johnson, Astrageneca are also exploring this segment. More & more contract labs are being setup in India.

Sequence data can be used to make predictions of the functions of newly identified genes, estimate evolutionary distance in phylogeny reconstruction, determine the active sites of enzymes, construct novel mutations and characterize alleles of genetic diseases to name just a few uses. Sequence data facilitates analysis of the organization of genes and genomes and their evolution, protein sequence can be predicted from DNA sequence which further facilitates possible prediction of protein properties, structure, and function (proteins rarely sequenced in entirety today), identification of regulatory elements in genes or RNAs, identification of mutations that lead to disease, etc. The simplest tasks used in bio-informatics concern the creation and maintenance of databases of biological information. Nucleic acid sequences (and the protein sequences derived from them) comprise the majority of such databases. While the storage and organization of millions of nucleotides is far from trivial, designing a database and developing an interface whereby researchers can both access existing information and submit new entries is only the beginning.

Source:  http://biotechspectrum.blogspot.com 
INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS
Pharmaceutical Industries
Proteomics
Genomics
Toxicology
Database Management
Biosocial Chemical software development
Life Science Industries
Combinatorial Libraries
Enzyme Production
Toxicoinformatics

Source:  http://biotechspectrum.blogspot.com 
RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
Drug Design
Pharmacophore mapping
Homology Modeling
QSAR
Gene Mapping
Sequence Analysis
High Throughput Screening
Biostatistics
Computational biology
Micro Array Techniques
Pharmacogenetics