User:Ricardo Vidal/Automated bioinformatic discovery

Topic/Title

 * Automated bioinformatic discovery: tools that tell you what you should know

Abstract
Work in progress - jotting down ideas to expand on

The goal of bioinformatics is to better understand the living cell and how it functions at the molecular level. By analyzing raw molecular sequence and structural data, bioinformatics research can generate new insights and provide a "global" perspective of the cell.

Currently there exist a large number of bioinformatics tools that allow researchers to analyze specific features of their biological data. If you are analyzing a DNA sequence, you can retrieve information regarding the GC content, repeats in your sequence, open reading frames, among many other features. The same happens when analyzing amino acid sequences, with a large number of tools available to retrieve different protein specific information.

By combining a group of tools focused on specific features, it would be of great utility to biological engineers to have the ability of querying a system that would not only retrieve the data directly related to the sequence but also suggested information of interest supplied by the system in an automated way and further annotate their findings.

Automated discovery related to a given sequence can provide biological engineers with insight into details that would not be easily found without a thorough analysis with a spectrum of different bioinformatics tools.