Basic Applied Bioinformatics

Appendix A: Usage of Internet for Bioinformatics

RK Choudhary

School of Animal Biotechnology, GADVASU, Ludhiana

Bioinformatics is the branch of science that deals with the processing of biological data with the help of computer science. In sequencing gene or protein data, for example, voluminous amounts of data are processed, analyzed for deriving biological meaning and, ultimately, stored for further use with the help of bioinformatics. Therefore, it is a hybrid science, comprising biology and computer science, that is conceptualizing biology in terms of macromolecules (in the sense of physical chemistry) and then applying “informatics” techniques (derived from disciplines such as applied mathematics, computer science, and statistics) to understand and organize the information associated with these molecules on a large scale (Luscombe et al., 2001).

The internet is an interconnected network of information across the globe that provides remote communications. The introduction of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP) (or, together, TCP/IP) by the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) in 1969 evolved remote communication radically. The IP number (example; 96.47.32.230) that recognizes the server and the computer is unique. Since it is hard to recognize these long strings of numbers, IP addresses have been associated with a Fully Quantified Domain Name (FQDN). For example, the IP address given above is associated with www.gadvasu.in, a website belonging ...