the.com/bioinformatics
where biology stopped reading life and started Ctrl+F-ing it.
means The science of using computers, algorithms, and statistics to store, search, and make sense of biological data — especially the vast sequences of DNA, RNA, and proteins.
from A 20th-century compound bolted together from Greek 'bios' (life) and 'informatics' — itself coined from 'information' (Latin 'informare,' to give form to, to shape the mind). The word emerged as biology drowned in sequence data and needed computation to swim; the Dutch researchers Paulien Hogeweg and Ben Hesper are often credited with coining the term in the early 1970s for the study of information processes in living systems, though it only caught fire decades later with the genome-sequencing boom.
- data scale
- One genome fills a few gigabytes of A, T, C, G
- origin
- Margaret Dayhoff coded protein sequences in the 1960s
- hidden job
- More coding than pipetting, more clusters than cultures
- BLAST
- Most-used algorithm cited millions of times
- junk myth
- Most genome was called junk, mostly wasn't
human genome project — international collaboration that sequenced all 3 billion base pairs of human dna, completed 2003
alphafold — deepmind's ai system that predicted 3d protein structures for 200 million proteins, revolutionizing structural biology since 2020
ncbi genbank — us national center for biotechnology information's database containing over 500 billion dna sequences from all organisms
crispr gene editing — jennifer doudna and emmanuelle charpentier's 2012 breakthrough enabling precise dna editing, won 2020 nobel prize