Bioinformatics is a well-known and highly established field of study in today’s time. Almost all the branches of Life Sciences have some connection with Bioinformatics. Be it genome sequencing or protein function and structural analysis. Due to its multidisciplinary nature, bioinformatics acts as a connecting link between experts from different fields of Natural Sciences. Mathematicians, Statisticians, Physicists, Chemists, and Biologists all are crossing paths while working on a project.
Though today the term “bioinformatics” is widely associated with the computational methods for genomic and proteomic data analysis, however, it was originally used for the study of “informatic processes in biotic systems”. Paulien Hogeweg, one of the proponents of the term, in her essay on “the roots of bioinformatics in theoretical biology” published in 2011, writes,
“From the late 1980s onward, the term “bioinformatics” mostly has been used to refer to computational methods for comparative analysis of genome data. However, the term was originally more widely defined as the study of “informatic processes in biotic systems.”
Paulien Hogeweg along with Ben Hesper is credited with coining the term “Bioinformatics” in 1970 in their seminal work on biotic systems, “Bioinformatica: een werkconcept (Bioinformatics: A work concept)” originally published in Dutch.
Joel B. Hagen, while tracing “the origins of bioinformatics” writes,
“Bioinformatics is often described as being in its infancy, but computers emerged as important tools in molecular biology during the early 1960s. A decade before DNA sequencing became feasible, computational biologists focused on the rapidly accumulating data from protein biochemistry. Without the benefits of supercomputers or computer networks, these scientists laid important conceptual and technical foundations for bioinformatics today.”
Joel B. Hagen
He further writes,
“By 1970, computational biologists had developed a diverse set of techniques for analyzing molecular structure, function, and evolution. Although originally designed for studying proteins, many of these computing techniques could be adapted for studying nucleic acids. Some of these techniques survive today or have lineal descendants that are used in bioinformatics. In other cases, they stimulated the development of more refined techniques to correct deficiencies in the original methods. Although the nascent field was later revolutionized by the advent of genome projects, large-scale computer networks, immense databases, supercomputers, and powerful desktop computers, today’s bioinformatics also rests on the important intellectual and technical foundations laid by scientists at an earlier period in the computer era.”
Joel B. Hagen
From the details discussed above, it is clear how the term “bioinformatics” came into existence and how “bioinformatics” became a developed field of study. But the question arises as to how and when “bioinformatics”, as it is now pursued, came into the horizon of Science. Answering this question, Paulien Hogeweg writes, “Propelled by the exponential increase of sequence data, the term bioinformatics became mainstream in the late 1980s, coming to mean the development and use of computational methods for data management and data analysis of sequence data, protein structure determination, homology-based function prediction, and phylogeny.”
It is evident from the historical notes, that it was Margarete Dayhoff who laid the foundation stone ofmodern bioinformatics. Her book “Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure” cataloging protein sequencing at that time is considered a milestone in the history of bioinformatics. It was this catalog that later transformed into the first-ever database of protein sequences, Protein Information Resource (PIR).
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