Advanced Techniques in Biology & Medicine
Open Access

Abstract

Genomic Databases and Softwares: In Pursuit of Biological Relevance through Bioinformatics

Mahima Kaushik, Swati Mahendru, Mohan Kumar, Swati Chaudhary and Shrikant Kukreti

With the completion of human genome project, a plethora of information had been available for exploring various unanswered questions related to cell and molecular biology. Bioinformatics has been instrumental in unravelling the genetic, phenotypic, structural and functional aspects of the whole genome by using this information. Genomics and proteomics have become one of the most relevant fields after the advancements in computational analysis, interpretation, and modelling software. It can not only quite categorically describe the position of nucleotides and amino acids throughout genomes and proteomes respectively, but it also helps in performing the phylogenetic analysis, search for associated transcription factors, multiple sequence alignments, and many other relevant explorations/hunts. The advances in the knowledge of genetics acquired from molecular biology and bioinformatics are applied and point towards potential therapeutic strategies such as genome editing. This review has an aim of discussing some of the bioinformatics databases and software, which has been utilized for exploring the position of a DNA sequence, any associated single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) related to a disease, on or nearby situated transcription factor binding sites followed by multiple sequence alignment of this sequence with other organisms. This study provides the insights in to the functional elements of any DNA, RNA or Protein sequence prior to exploring the structural polymorphism, which may regulate the gene expression. Also, this review briefly discusses the tools used for programmable nuclease–based genome editing technology.