1. Workshop: Bioinformatics
By Belinda Román
Bioinformatics is the application of statistics and computer science to the field of
molecular biology. A few things that we can do with the usage of bioinformatics are
mapping and analyzing DNA and protein sequences, and aligning different DNA and
protein sequences to compare them . In this workshop, I learned where and how people are
using this area of sciences, and how it is contributing to investigations, making it easy for
scientists to access data that is already known. In order for me to understand how
bioinformatics works, I made a practice using the following database website:
www.ncbi.nlm.gov. Here I looked first for the DNA sequence of the fibrinogen alpha chain
in different species of organisms. In this step, I varied the search by also using accession
numbers. Then, we learned how to translate a DNA sequence into a protein. In order to do
this, the database translates the sequence into an amino acid sequence and then into a
protein. Another interesting thing I did was the comparison of two sequences from
different species. At the end, I was able to interpret the results of each of the different
techniques used for searching and comparing sequences.