Bioinformatics
...announced in June 2000 at a press conference at the White House and was published in the February 15, 2001 issue of the journal Nature.
Over the past few decades, major advances in the field of molecular biology, coupled with advances in genomic technologies, have led to an explosive growth in the biological information generated by the scientific community. This deluge of genomic information has, in turn, led to an absolute requirement for computerized databases to store, organize, and index the data and for specialized tools to view and analyze the data.
What Is a Biological Database?
A biological database is a large, organized body of persistent data, usually associated with computerized software designed to update, query, and retrieve components of the data stored within the system. A simple database might be a single file containing many records, each of which includes the same set of information. For example, a record associated with a nucleotide sequence database typically contains information such as contact name, the input sequence with a description of the type of molecule, the scientific name of the source organism from which it was isolated, and often, literature citations associated with the sequence.
For researchers to benefit from the data stored in a database, two additional requirements must be met:
* easy access to the information
* a method for extracting only that information needed to answer a specific biological question
The data in GenBank are made available in a variety of ways, each tailored to a particular use, such as data submission or sequence searching.
At NCBI, many of our databases are linked through a unique search and retrieval system, called Entrez. Entrez (pronounced ahn' tray) allows a user to not only access and retrieve specific information from a single database but to access...
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