Change is the only thing that never changes,of course biology is
not left over from change.Embracing all changes in the field of
evolution to systems biology,genetics to genomics &proteomics,cell
biology to molecular biology,basic chemistry & physics to biochemistry & biophysics,computers to bioinformatics &
computational biology has been depicting the everyday growth of life
science.conventional biologists hated mathematics and computers but
the field of computational biology has narrowed down to young minds
of this generation who play eventually well competitive to core
mathematicians and computer scientists.
Being a computational biologist,i can rewind my life back where my interest lied in working with computers (both hardware & software) but had no interest on the programming side.I remember the times where i used my PC only for listening to music and playing solitaire.But now things have changed,that i found computers can be used for more utilities than facebooking,orkutting,tweeting,gaming and listening music!
Let me jot down how a computer can help me with my research in computational biology.Before that,What is computational biology? In simple terms,it develops theoretical methods for biology and bio-tools with the use of mathematical modeling and computational simulations involving data analysis.How does it differ from bioinformatics? Its simple again.Bioinformaticians develop tools that the computational biology platform has coded.They encode ,build new softwares using algorithms and work more on software and programming related side.Doesn't a computational biologist do programming? Yes of course he does it too..A perfect blend of statistics,computer science, applied mathematics,evolution,biophysics, molecular biology,genetics,ecology,chemistry and neuroscience makes a computational biologist. He need not be an expert in all the aforementioned fields but a sound knowledge with application skills would help in becoming an expert in computational biologist.
Being a computational biologist,i can rewind my life back where my interest lied in working with computers (both hardware & software) but had no interest on the programming side.I remember the times where i used my PC only for listening to music and playing solitaire.But now things have changed,that i found computers can be used for more utilities than facebooking,orkutting,tweeting,gaming and listening music!
Let me jot down how a computer can help me with my research in computational biology.Before that,What is computational biology? In simple terms,it develops theoretical methods for biology and bio-tools with the use of mathematical modeling and computational simulations involving data analysis.How does it differ from bioinformatics? Its simple again.Bioinformaticians develop tools that the computational biology platform has coded.They encode ,build new softwares using algorithms and work more on software and programming related side.Doesn't a computational biologist do programming? Yes of course he does it too..A perfect blend of statistics,computer science, applied mathematics,evolution,biophysics, molecular biology,genetics,ecology,chemistry and neuroscience makes a computational biologist. He need not be an expert in all the aforementioned fields but a sound knowledge with application skills would help in becoming an expert in computational biologist.
- I can access umpteen number of international journals related
to my project.Learning how to search in Google and getting exact
hits matters a lot than surfing for an hour in Google to get the
required literature!
- I can create,edit and access databases which keeps my query
results at my door step..and making use of data warehouses eases my
work much easier.
- Knowing the sequence or at least the name of the gene/protein
i am interested will help me model its whole structure leading to
further look into possible ideas that can be generated with regard
to analysis.
- I can simulate biological molecules and have a look at their
most minimum energy state in silico and dock with chemical
inhibitors,predict their conformations in silico which gives me a
deeper understanding of the process a molecule undergoes actually
and using a PC will rather reduce my wet laboratory cost.Though
confirmation of the insilico prediction and determination of structures requires crystallographic and NMR techniques,the narrowing
down to subject of interest is greatly enhanced by the use of
computers.
- Tools like Discovery
studio,QSAR,R,GROMACS,AutoDock,Schordinger,CCP4,CNS
solve,Rosetta,Modeller,Desmond,MEGA,Viewer softwares like
Rasmol,Pymol etc..can be used extensively in this field for
generating desired results (There are many more online tools
too)one can get every information available on genes,mRNA's,proteins
that has been updated ,keeping us run along the track with
multinational competitors.
- This course,in Tamil Nadu is being offered at post-grad level
by DBT at Pondicherry University,Anna University and Madurai kamaraj
University.
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