It's thought that biology and computer science
don't have anything in common, but that's entirely a false accusation because
surprisingly computer science benefited from biology you can check my previous
blog about DNA computing for more details about that. Moreover, biology
wouldn't reach the stage it did today without computer science since now we've
already figured out what every gene does! This strong connection resulted in
the creation of many interdisciplinary fields, one of which is computational
biology.
What's computational biology?
In general, Computational biology is the
application of computers and computational techniques to biological data. It's
definition is extended to cover a wide range of applications from data basing
of fundamental datasets such as protein and DNA sequences, and even laboratory
processes, to sophisticated analyses such as the modeling of protein structures
and cellular networks. Areas related to that include Neuroinformatics and
Medical informatics too which are the areas of modeling nervous systems and
medical data sets
What's needed for computational biology?
Data structures: This is one of the most
essential parts because without organizing the data you collect in a uniform
way you won't end up with any patterns to work with in the first place and it
would be all just a huge packs of data that aren't useful enough. For example, when
collecting DNA sequences, we have to make sure the samples won't be mixed up
when inputted and it will be all organized, and the machine should be able to
find out what part of our data look similar to each other?
Data processing & Machine learning: The next
step would be to use the patterns collected and make sense out of them, so an
example would be connecting the animals that have symmetric features and
labeling them according to that.
Is computational biology the only field that connects the dots between computer science and Biology?
No, there are many other fields that require this
connection, like bioengineering, computational evolutionary biology and there
will be many more in the future quoting what Bill Gates said "Biology is a
sister science "I think a lot of the
breakthroughs will be made by people who were trained in biology and computer
science,"
Is biology the only one that cries for computer science attention ?
It's not only biology out of the sciences that
thrives for computer science attention, Physics, Chemistry, Math and even the
social sciences benefit from computing too, and there's always an inverse
relationship for that because without Math, and Physics there won't be even
computers so we need these connections to power up our devices every day but
can we evolve out computational methods to live on itself? and if we can what
could we get out of that? These are important questions that the leading computer
scientists have to think about each and every day!
Picture References :
1-http://previews.123rf.com/images/radiantskies/radiantskies1212/radiantskies121203363/17021260-Abstract-word-cloud-for-Computational-biology-with-related-tags-and-terms-Stock-Photo.jpg
2-http://dhmri.org/assets/PageImage-Bioinformatics.jpg