~BIOINFORMATICS~
Biological informatics technology, Bioinformatics, is an emerging scientific discipline that uses information technology to organize, visually analyze, and distribute biological information in order to answer complex biological questions. Bioinformatics tools enable researchers to cope with the increasing flood of biological data and to answer a variety of biological questions in a fraction of the time it would take using traditional analysis techniques (http://bioinformatics-canada.org/).
Bioinformatics is the use of computer technology to solve biological and medical problems. The bioinformatics Supercomputing Centre is the 455th-most powerful computing centre in the world and the largest centre devoted solely to biomedical research. Its computing power is equivalent to 1700 PCs. The need for this level of computing resource is driven both by the amount and complexity of biological data. More biological data will be generated in 2000 than the total of all data collected up to that point (CMAJ: Canadian Medical Association Journal, April 2000).
The computational power of the Origin 2000 is supplemented by an IBM RS/6000 SP3 system, a group of five nodes that are accessed independently and optimized for database use. Basic Local Alignment and Search Tool (BLAST) is the most widely used application and can be accessed through a web interface developed at the centre. This application is designed to compare protein and nucleic acid sequences against a selection of genetic databases to calculate percent homology (CMAJ: Canadian Medical Association Journal, April 2000).
Bioinformatics is a relatively new term and is associated with molecular databases that, when served via the Web, can be queried to determine whether nucleic acid or protein sequences new to one research laboratory are, in fact, new to science.
Bioinformatics technologies have been explored both as long term goals and short term goals at the Centre for Biodiversity and Bioresources (CBB), Macquarie University, Sydney. The short term goal is to facilitate invertebrate biodiversity assessments on spatial scales that are large enough to be useful to resource managers and conservation planners. The long term goal is to develop and promote protocols surrounding the generation and use of local virtual reference collections (digital image databases) of species and species characters. The virtual collections that are developed and stored on site by each team of invertebrate biodiversity researchers will ultimately be linked by search engines. This will create a Web-based system that allows a user to simultaneously search mulitiple local, or distributed, databases and determine whether an invertebrate species new to their research is also new to science. The online invertebrate identification network would be analogous to that used by molecular biologists searching their distributed databases with new molecular sequences (Bioscience, May 2000).
~Useful Links~
Bioinformatics Supercomputing Centre