Terms & Concepts

Bioinformatics is a branch of biology and computer science that deals with acquiring, storing, analysing, and disseminating biological data, most commonly DNA and amino acid sequences. Bioinformatics makes use of computer algorithms to determine gene and protein functions, establish evolutionary linkages, and forecast the three-dimensional structures of proteins, among other things. Alignment is the process of comparing two or more gene or protein sequences to see how similar their base or amino acid sequences are. Clustering is used to generate new attributes that are abstractions of the current attributes of the objects. The quality of clustering is influenced by the distance measure in the space. Data cleaning is a technique for removing noise, experimental mistakes, and other artefacts from experimental data using automated or semi-automatic methods in order to develop and maintain high-quality data for further analysis.