Glossary
1. Bioinformatics : Bioinformatics is nothing but research, development, or application of computational tools and approaches for expanding the use of biological, medical, behavioral or health data, including those to acquire, store, organize, archive, analyze, or visualize such data.
2. Biotechnology : Biotechnology is the use of biological processes, organisms, or systems to manufacture products intended to improve the quality of human life.
3. BLOCKS: Blocks are ungapped multiple alignments of segments of related protein sequences that correspond to the most conserved regions of proteins.
4. Comparative Genomics : The study of human genetics by comparisons with model organisms such as mice, the fruit fly, and the bacterium E. coli.
5. Dotplot : A dot plot is a visual representation of the similarities between two sequences.
6.Dynamic programming:It is a computational method used to align two protein or nucleic acid sequences.
7. Є value:It is the difference between the score of the alignment of the pair of sequences in the alignment and the score of the optimal pair-wise alignment.
8. Gene therapy : Gene therapy is a technique for correcting defective genes responsible for disease development.
9. Histogram: It is a graphical representation of the distribution of the normalized scores matching with the query sequence in the FASTA algorithm.
10. Homolgs : Homologs are similar sequences in two different organisms that have been derived from a common ancestor sequence. Homologs can be described as either orthologous or paralogous.
11. Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic: This statistic will yields information about the deviation between the observed and expected distributions in the FASTA algorithm.
12. δ value: It is the sum of Єs. It gives an indication of degree of divergence among the sequences.
13. Multiple Sequence alignment: It is nothing but an alignment of k sequences simultaneously, where k is any number greater than two.
14. Molecular medicine : The branch of medicine that deals with the influence of gene expression on disease processes and with genetically based treatments, such as gene therapy.
15. Orthologs : Orthologs are similar sequences in two different organisms that have arisen due to a speciation event. Orthologs typically retain their functionality throughout evolution.
16. PAM unit : A PAM unit is a measure for the amount of evolutionary distance between two amino acid sequences.
17. Paralogs : Paralogs are similar sequences within a single organism that have arisen due to gene duplication event.18. Personalized medicine : Personalized medicine is use of information and data from a patient's genotype, or level of gene expression to stratify disease, select a medication, provide a therapy, or initiate a preventative measure that is particularly suited to that patient at the time of administration. In addition to genetic information, other factors, including imaging, laboratory, and clinical information about the disease process or the patient play an equally important role.
19. Pfam: It is a large database collection of protein families and domains.
20. PRINTS : A database collection of protein motif fingerprints.
21. PROSITE: PROSITE is an annotated collection of motif descriptors dedicated to the identification of protein families and domains.
22. WebLogo: A web based application used to develop sequence logos.
23. Xenologs : Xenologs are similar sequences that do not share the same evolutionary origin, but rather have arisen out of horizontal transfer events through symbiosis, viruses, etc.