Human Health and Bioinformatics
Advanced Health Technology
Complete the homework based on teachings in class & extra reading.
Refer health-bioinformatics resources for more relevant information.
Significance of Multi-omics Studies
Multi-omics Multi-omics, variously called integrated omics, pan-omics, and trans-omics, aims to combine two or more omics data sets to aid in data analysis, visualization and interpretation to determine the mechanism of a biological process. Read More Complete the homework by adding your understanding as a comment below. Refer resources for more relevant information. NHGRI multi-omics workshop Review Article Answer in the comment section below
After this week of learning and exploring bioinformatics I can confidently say that I wish I knew about it earlier- also there's a lot more to learn and it’s a huge subject. It’s crazy to think that if you were to ask me about bioinformatics 4 days ago I would have had no idea what it is, but now I have an entire list of things to say. Bioinformatics is mainly referred to as applying tools of computation and analysis in order to develop methods which help understand biological data. Bioinformatics involves many subtopics including genomics, proteomics, image analysis, drug designing, and much more. While bioinformatics has been used in various fields, it works best in areas requiring precision and medicine. Bioinformatics is popular in preventive medicines which develop ways to prevent and treat diseases by studying organism’s genes and DNA. It’s commonly used in gene therapy, evolutionary studies, microbial studies, protein studies, and many more. Currently it’s being used to help treat patients with diseases such as cancer and has a promising future with AI (artificial intelligence).
ReplyDeleteWhat I learned this week from this course, is there are many different elements to bioinformatics. I find it interesting how its only used for genetics, but its reach is so far. It is being used for all types of treatments. Within bioinformatics there are different fields such as omics, genome annotation, AI, etc. I believe bioinformatics will grow very quickly once its true capabilities are reached and it will have a profound impact on virtually every field of science. I also believe that bioinformatics will grow to the point where it is the core of every type treatment and all medicines are created using research extracted from bioinformatics. A great example of this, in my opinion, is the COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine uses mRNA technology which wouldn't be possible without bioinformatics.
ReplyDeleteBefore this course, I hardly knew how bioinformatics is widely used across biology and medicine. Earlier, I believed that bioinformatics was a restricted subject that can only be applied to certain technological functions that scientists use to predict and analyze certain biological components. After learning about the wide variety of fields within bioinformatics --- from omics and cancer, to SNPs, and diagnosis & prognosis --- this course truly enabled me to see the bigger picture of bioinformatics and its absolute importance for not just scientists but medical professionals everywhere. With technology rapidly advancing, I believe that the field of bioinformatics is going to be even more recognized as a necessity for many labs and hospitals, not just to understand our genomics but to help cure, prevent and identify diseases, through the use of increased bioinformatics technology.
ReplyDeleteIn this class, I learned the importance of bioinformatics. Before, I barely knew what the field was and how it impacts our world. Through computers and analysis, people are able to use bioinformatics to research many things about our genes, medicine, diseases and much more. I also never knew how connected the world is in this field. There are many databases that store different DNA sequences that other people can access for research. People from all around the world are working together to push the limits of science to find treatments for diseases and ways to make drugs safer. Despite all these advances, I learned that there is a lot that is not known. For example, people are still trying to find the functions of all the genes and proteins in the human body. I believe bioinformatics will create new findings in many different fields and benefit the world.
ReplyDeleteMy previous bioinformatics knowledge was limited to the use of NCBI, but through this course, I realized that it has so many more elements. Bioinformatics can provide useful information to help with treatments of genetic disorders and coming up with new drugs. The analysis of omics can help scientists get a more holistic view of the mechanisms occurring in our body, which helps provide safer drugs. DNA sequencing can help identify mutations in the DNA that cause disorders, which provide potential for scientists to provide methods that help treat genetic disorders.
ReplyDeletePrior to this course, I hardly even knew what bioinformatics meant, let alone how the different subcategories within this subject worked! This being said, I now understand that bioinformatics plays a crucial role in the study of biology, with its subcategories ranging from omics, genomic annotation, sequence alignment, SNPs, etc. It's really interesting to see how bioinformatics can be applied to different situations in the medical field, such as using SNPs to diagnose patients with specific diseases or understand the efficacy of certain medications on those patients. Clearly, bioinformatics is already so important in the medical field, but this is just the beginning, and there is still so much we don't know. I look forward to seeing how the subject continues to become more and more advanced and interconnected with the medical field over the next few years!
ReplyDeleteIn this class, I learned so much about bioinformatics. Which was something I didn't even know existed before! Bioinformatics is a combination of biology and technology. The technology aspect was a bit overwhelming at first, but once I understood the different types of software it was really facinating. One of the things I loved learning about bioinformatics is the many ways we can use it to help other people. Whether we are DNA sequencing, studying metabolomics/proteomics/genomics, using bioinformatic software, doing genetic annotation, or studying SNPs, you are guaranteed to be helping someone who needs you! It's not only interesting to learn about, but also helpful to others. I loved learning all the different forms of disease prevention, analysis, and curing. I also love how there is still so much to learn and discover in this field, you will never get tired or feel as if there's nothing left to do! I can't wait to take more classes and learn more about bioinformatics.
ReplyDeleteAfter this week's workshop I learned that bioinformatics is much more than analyzing data, but that it also includes having a complete understanding of genetics and the uncertainty that comes with it, which is what allows this field to continue to evolve. Some of the main things I learned this week was what omics are: something that uses a large amount/scale of data in order to have a larger understanding of life; I learned how various database tools work: BLAST and Genome Browser; I learned more specific details about genetics: SNPs and metabolmics; lastly, I learned that bioinformatics is field that works with various fields of biology and medicine and that it requires a lot of time and people.
ReplyDeleteBefore this course, I knew a lot about biotech and different wet lab techniques, but not a lot about what we can do after getting the data and results. Due to this course, I learned that bioinformatics is such an important aspect of analyzing and interpreting data, but I feel as if it is not as well known. But now I know that bioinformatics involves with using biological data and running it through algorithms and software to receive more knowledge on the subject. Also the genome browser really captured my interest, because I cannot completely comprehend how people developed these sites to investigate genomes! But this was only one of the topics that caught my eye. I really enjoyed attending this course!
ReplyDeleteEsther Y.:
ReplyDeleteBioinformatics is a field of computational science concerned with the analysis of sequences of biological molecules. Usually refers to genes, DNA, RNA or proteins, and is particularly useful in comparing proteins and other sequences within organisms or between organisms, looking at evolutionary relationships between organisms, and using patterns present in DNA and protein sequences to figure out their function. You can think of bioinformatics as the linguistic part of genetics. That is, linguistics people are studying patterns in language, and that's what bioinformatics people do -- look for patterns in DNA or protein sequences. In order to study how normal cell activity is altered in different disease states, biological data must be combined to form a comprehensive picture of these activities. As a result, the field of bioinformatics has evolved to the point where the most pressing tasks now involve the analysis and interpretation of various types of data. This also includes nucleotide and amino acid sequences, protein domains and protein structure.
To me, the main goal of bioinformatics is to increase understanding of biological processes. However, it differs from other approaches in that it focuses on developing and applying computation-intensive technologies to achieve this goal. Over the past few decades, rapid advances in genomics and other molecular research techniques have combined with advances in information technology to produce a large amount of information related to molecular biology.
Esther: After the five-day courses, bioinformatics became more comprehensive to me. Before, I studied the basic information of it, which includes the data bases, analyzing methods and so on. However, the studies were only theoretically, and those technologies were seemingly too advanced. After this week's study, I learned how to apply the materials and technologies into practical, which I think is the most meaningful thing to me.
DeleteBioinformatics focuses more on the analysis of data (omics being one of the many ways to analyze data) with computers. Technology has allowed researchers to store an organism's genetic information, and allowed scientists to make certain diseases more predictable. Since bioinformatics relies on so much technology, there is still so much more to be unlocked with AI and better technology. Using technology, we are able to better understand certain biological processes. I learned how there are so many cool databases that we could use to explore in depth on certain proteins, genes, and nucleotides (NCBI, UCSC Genome Broswer). Overall, I had a lot of fun in this course-- I still have a lot to learn! Happy New Year Everyone!
ReplyDeleteBioinformatics is the area of study that focuses on analyzing and interpreting biological data. This new approach to science has shown to be useful in a variety of biological problems and therapeutic strategies, as seen in cancer research. Through its omics branches, different methods can be employed in the field of cancer research and provide further insight about the different genetic sequences, epigenetic factors, proteins that could be involved with this disease. This workshop has been an invaluable experience for me these past couple of days as I have learned about a wide spread of topics such as genomic annotations, DNA sequencing, GWAS, and metabolomics. I especially enjoyed the hands-on activities we did with genome browsing and and IGV. Thank you for teaching us Dr. Ojha and Happy New Year to all!
ReplyDeleteFrankly, it's surprising that I had never heard of bioinformatics while knowing the overall idea of the lab work in genetics. Bioinformatics has become one of the pillars of genetic research as it allows the handling and analysis of the extremely complex data that genes contain.
ReplyDeleteBioinformatics is a combination of informatics and biological studies that allow for researchers to automate the bulk of the most complex biological analysis and store the information for later objectives and sharing it.
For example, genetic study requires sequencing the DNA in order to read it, but since DNA has so many individual nucleotides to read, bioinformatics allows the data to be read and processed into a format that can be read by researchers so that it can be understood.
The capacity to interpret this data is what turns bioinformatics into such an important discipline for modern science, because the more complex our studies get, the more processing power we need to handle them.
And the human brain is a little busy dealing with everything that makes us human to be able to read every nucleotide in a genome.
The most interesting information that I found was how genetic and epigenetic aberrations give rise to the hallmarks of cancer. If we know which genes are giving rise to cancer then we can develop a diagnostic and prognostic marker.
ReplyDeleteBefore this workshop, I did not know basically anything about bioinformatics, and I certainly did not know that it involved computers to the amount it does. My take on bioinformatics is combining the knowledge of different biological processes to understand the overall function of things such as the human body. Bioinformatics can also be applied in many ways as the article for this homework explains that it can be used for medicinal knowledge, learning more about diseases, developing cures, increasing treatment accuracy, and more. However, the article states that the largest factor of bioinformatics is "drug discovery". ~Cassina
ReplyDeleteThis class was an introductory course to bioinformatics to me. I previously believed that bioinformatics was only able to be done with supercomputers and would sequence large DNA strands as a whole, and I was half right. I did not expect to use the software and analyze the TP genome.
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