Bioinformatics: Its Role in Drug Discovery

Bioinformatics is the science of understanding the organization of information in biological systems and exploiting that understanding in solving biological problems. Such problems typically involve assessment of the function of a gene by comparing its similarity with that of previously characterized genes or gene products. In the context of drug discovery, bioinformatics is used both as a means of enabling identification of novel drug targets and also of organizing data in drug discovery information systems. An understanding of the relationships between data, information, and knowledge in these research processes is crucial to appreciating the impact bioinformatics can make in drug discovery. Aspects of some of the bioinformatics necessary to gain an insight into the use of genomics are presented, along with discussions of transcript expression profiling, functional genomics, and structural genomics as sources of data for bioinformatics.

Keywords: bioinformatics; transcript profiling; functional genomics; information management; knowledge management; target discovery; structural genomics; sequence analysis; expressed sequence tags