Monday, October 31, 2016

where computer science and biology meet...

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


2 comments:

  1. Such an interesting article. It was cool how you mentioned the way that biology is not the only field that benefits from computer science. Out of all the topics you mentioned (biology, physics, chemistry, math, and psychology), which do you think benefits from computer science the most?

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  2. I've always thought the applications of combining science and computer science could be very powerful. When you think about it, there is just such a vast quantity of data in the scientific fields that the ability to process it with programs will be crucial to our scientific progress in the future.

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