INTRODUCTION

There is no doubt that bioinformatics has become an active field in recent years. But what is bioinformatics? According to NIH [1], bioinformatics applies the principles of information sciences and technologies to make the vast, diverse and complex life sciences data more understandable and useful. While using supercomputers to decode human genomes is an impressive bioinformatics task, analyzing your own data using a desktop PC and a spreadsheet software could also be called as bioinformatics. In any case, bioinformatics serves as a bridge linking the information technology and biology in this genomic era.

The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of the bioinformatics technologies, with emphasis on those directly applicable to genomics and drug discovery. The first several sections will introduce the basic sequence analysis technologies, including similarity comparison, database searching, gene finding, protein structures prediction and protein-ligand docking. Applications of those technologies to two biological problems genome sequencing and the EST mining will be discussed. Finally, the trends and the challenges of bioinformatics will be addressed.

SEQUENCE ANALYSIS

Although it is relatively easy to obtain a DNA or protein sequence in a laboratory, determining its function or structure by direct experiment remains a tedious and costly procedure. Hence, using computers to infer biological information from DNA or protein sequences are one of the most important problems of bioinformatics. The computational method for solving those problems is called sequence analysis.

SEQUENCE COMPARISON

The type of...