Bioinformatics is a culmination of the disciplines of computer science, biological sciences and chemical science. The result is an opening up of a new window of opportunity for science students.

The dawn of the 21st century has heralded the arrival of a new career known as bioinformatics. This field comprises of a marriage and synthesis of the disciplines of computer science, biological sciences and chemical science. The result is an opening up of a new window of opportunity for science students interested in taking the plunge into this new, exciting and uncharted waters.

An interview with Dr Sowdhamini, Research scientist at the National Center for biological sciences revealed the following information in the field of bioinformatics and pursuing a career in it.

The History
The computational modelling of Biomolecules has a very old history, around the time when chemical bonds were proposed by Linus Pauling, and the discovery of the structure of DNA and Collagen. However Bioinformatics has a more recent past. This area emerged in response to the need to organize vast amount of information, for example protein sequences emerging from high-throughput genome sequencing projects.

What is it?
Bioinformatics is the science of organization and management of biological data. There is much more to it than creation of biological databases. It is known for its predictive power where in patterns can be recognised and hypotheses and relationships proposed using computer algorithms.

Bioinformatics finds its applications in the rational design of high-throughput experiments, mass function prediction of genes, probing undiscovered biological pathways, drug discovery.

Bioinformatics is a heterogenous field with people from computer science, management and biology working together. The field involves learning from available information and derivation of patterns and rules from knowledge based methods. There is challenging work involved in fitting models to Biological data and deriving rules and patterns as most biological data are fuzzy, complex and seldom behave ideally. Computer scientists include machine learning techniques, genetic algorithms and techniques like Hidden Markov models to train programmes to recognize correct connections from wrong connections, before applying the methods on new biological problems.

Some computer algorithms address biological problems from first principles.However this route is computationally intensive owing to a huge size of biomolecules or include heuristic methods with a number of approximations.

A career in bioinformatics offers splendid prospects and the opportunity to address health issues like genetic disorders, epidemics and life threatening diseases. It offers a chance to understand the biological process of a metabolic cell and complex networks between biomolecules. The field has tremendous scope in participating in drug discovery to combat or prevent diseases and involves novel methods such as gene therapy to address disorders. Such applications have a direct impact on bettering the lifestyle of mankind and therefore appeals to society.

In order to qualify as a Bioinformatician a person has to learn the basics of biology, biochemistry and biophysics. A masters degree in Biology, Physics, Chemistry, or Computer science lays the foundation for a bioinformatician.

Whichever stream a candidate comes from it is compulsory to learn biology.There are institutes now which offer bioinformatics degree at the masters level.

Having acquired the relevant qualification a bioinformatician works in the life sciences sphere in industries such as drug and pharma companies, genome research companies and high throughput industries in roles such as computational biologist, gene analyst, protein analyst, structural analyst etc.

He/she commences their career with a salary of Rs 15,000 a month which after 3-4 years of experience can go upwards of Rs 50,000 a month.

Progress in a career in bioinformatics is possible by ambitious and clever design of problems, ability to participate in research consortia and by providing solutions to underlying biological problems.

Thus the future for bioinformatics looks bright and promising. Bioinformatics can be the future of several areas of biology - especially in high throughput experiments and is finding its place in academic and corporate consortia. Therefore the going looks good and a person pursuing a career in bioinformatics is set to fly high in this the new millennium.

By Preetam Pereira

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