Evolutionary Bioinformatics: The evolution that led to the collision of two sciences
Bioinformatics is a diversified field which integrates molecular biology and genetics, mathematics, computer science and statistics. [i] The term Bioinformatics dates back to 1960s, when computer was first introduced to evaluate the biological data. Bioinformatics developed into an independent discipline in 1990s because of the outbreak of genomic sequencing data. In 2003, the success of Human Genome Project marked as a noticeable achievement, as it acquired an ample amount of data which called for the use of computational tools for interpretation.[ii]
Evolutionary Bioinformatics:
Evolutionary Bioinformatics is a field which involves the interpretation of biological information by using computational tools and methods integrating evolutionary biology to study the diversity of life. The aspects covered by evolutionary biology are phylogenetics, molecular evolution, comparative genomics, and evolutionary developmental biology (Evo-Devo) and others.
Role of evolutionary bioinformatics in phylogenetics:
Phylogenetics draws evolutionary relationship between species using hereditary information. The questions arise concerning the relation among the genes which are catered by the knowledge of phylogenetics. It also helps in tracking down the genesis of the contagious diseases. The people working in related field emphasize on the reorganization and alteration of phylogenetic trees as it is a standard practice which involves the study of genetics, the information from vast data of genes is extracted using bioinformatics knowledge involving computational methods and tools involving MEGA (Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis) and the rest.[iii]
Comparative Genomics: Insight into Genetic Mysteries
Comparative genomics is generally interpreted on the basis of biological data procured from a whole genome sequence. It studies the identification and functions of genes in organisms to inquire the genetic makeup of species and evolutionary pressure which forms the genome architecture. As soon as the bioinformatics tools came in hand the proteins, RNAs, and gene annotations were derived from them which was a turning point in the history of evolutionary bioinformatics resulting in help for advanced researches. [iv]Comparative genomics is the elementary tool for genome analysis which focuses on the analysis of genomes and its associated evolutionary research.[v]
Molecular Evolution: Unraveling the journey from Mutations to Adaptations
The shortest explanation of evolution is “Descent with modification”. The alterations in genetically inherited characters of a specie lead to evolutionary changes and is a source of diversity which can be at all levels of biological organization which also includes the macromolecular level discussing DNA and proteins. The accessibility of the genome sequence of specie gives the data for evolutionary studies. It provides base for vast applications of bioinformatics such as sequence identity, sequence alignment, motif analysis, chromosomal synteny analysis which gives rise to determining the rate of molecular evolution.[vi]
Evolutionary developmental biology (Evo–Devo):
Evolutionary Developmental biology (Evo-Devo) is a field that marks the developmental mechanism which is a cause of evolutionary differences in the phenotype of the organisms. Evo-Devo reflects the idea of relation between the modification of an organism among a single generation or the modification that carries out between generations.[vii]The questions arise about the visible differences in the morphology during the process of evolution using ontologies, methods of visualization of bioinformatics and tools like MATLAB are applied to study the evolutionary phenotypic ratios.[viii]
Software and Key tools in Evolutionary Bioinformatics:
Software and tools are the fundamentals which work as a driving element in bioinformatics. These tools are the source of extracting and visualizing useful information from a scattered data which may include: The sequence alignment tools (BLAST and Clustal Omega)[ix], phylogenetic analysis tools (MEGA [x]and RAxML[xi]), Genome Annotation tools (Prokka[xii]and Maker[xiii]) and structural tools (PyMol [xiv]and MODELLER[xv]). These tools play an important role in evolutionary bioinformatics.
Conclusion:
Evolutionary bioinformatics is a blend of evolutionary biology and of computational tools which allows the study of evolutionary aspects in species involving the experimental data which is arranged and the beneficial facts and figures are withdrawn from it to formulate new learnings. It is one of the diverse fields of science which permits the intermingling of two different disciplines resulting in a new world known as evolutionary bioinformatics
References:
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[x]Kumar, S., Nei, M., Dudley, J., & Tamura, K. (2008). MEGA: a biologist-centric software for evolutionary analysis of DNA and protein sequences. Briefings in Bioinformatics, 9(4), 299–306. doi:10.1093/bib/bbn017
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