PROTEINS

The word proteins is the most heard term in the study of dna and genes. so what is protein???

It is one of the fundamental material in the structure of most living things.Proteins are the organic compounds made of amino acids arranged in a linear chain and folded into a globular form.Like other biological macromolecules proteins are essential parts of organisms and participate in every process within the cells.

Proteins are assembled from amino acids using information encoded in genes.Each protein has its own unique amino acid sequence that is specified by the nucleotide sequence of the gene encoding this protein.The process of synthesizing a protein from an mRNA template is known as translation.So Proteins are the chief actors within the cell, said to be carrying out the duties specified by the information encoded in genes.They are one of the building blocks in the cell.And also proteins serve as enzymic catalysts also.And proteins are important for regulating physiological processes, energy production within the body's structure.

GENOME ANNOTATION

Genome annotation is defined as the process of identifying the locations of genes and all of the coding regions in a genome .Here annotation indicates a note added by way of explanation or commentary. Once a genome is sequenced, it needs to be annotated to make sense of it.So genome annotation is the process of attaching biological information to sequences.

This process is of two steps:

1- identifying elements on the genome.

2- attaching biological information to these elements.

This field is an active area of investigation and involves a number of different organizations in the life science community which publish the results of their efforts in publicly available biological databases accessible via the web and other electronic means and a variety of software tools have been developed to permit scientists to view and share genome annotations.If we go further deep into this field we have again two types: structural annotation and functional annotation.

COMPARATIVE GENOMICS

Comparative genomics is the analysis and comparison of genomes from different species. The purpose is to gain a better understanding of how species have evolved and to determine the function of genes and noncoding regions of the genome.It involves the use of computer programs that can line up multiple genomes and look for regions of similarity among them.So this field aims to take advantage of the information provided by the signatures of selection to understand the function and evolutionary processes that act on genomes.It studies both the proteins,RNA and regulatory regions of different organisms.One of the important goals of this field is the identification of the mechanisms of eukaryotic genome evolution.SO this field is also a fascinating one and also exciting.It is a new field of biological research.The information provided by this field helps scientists for better understanding of the structure and function of human genes and thereby develop new strategies to combat human disease.

BIOINFORMATICS

This is one of the fascinating and growing fields at present.Actually bio informatics is the application of information technology and computer science to the field of molecular biology.It is the science of using computer technology to gather, store, analyse and merge biological data.And it also deals with the gathering of data from genomic analysis into accessible and usable forms.SO in brief we can say that bioinformatics is the science of developing computer software and algorithms to record and analyze biology related data, eg gene, protein, metabolic pathways and active drug ingredients data.Bioinformatics now entails the creation and advancement of databases, algorithms, computational and statistical techniques and theory to solve formal and practical problems arising from the management and analysis of biological data.Common activities in bioinformatics include mapping and analyzing dna and protein sequences, aligning different DNA and protein sequences to compare them and creating and viewing 3-D models of protein structures.The main goal of bioinformatics is to increase the understanding of biological processes.Bioinformatics was applied in the creation and maintenance of a database to store biological information at the beginning of the "genomic revolution", such as nucleotide and amino acid sequences.

MAIN FUNCTION OF GENES

The main function of genes is to provide the information needed to make molecules called proteins in cells.Proteins are made of a chain of 20 different types of amino acids molecules.The information in DNA is held in the sequence of the repeating units along the DNA chain. These units are four types of nucleotides((A,T,G and C) and the sequence of nucleotides stores information in an alphabet called the genetic code. When a gene is read by a cell the DNA sequence is copied into a very similar molecule called RNA.If the sequence of the nucleotides in a gene changes, the sequence of the amino acids in the protein it produces may also change - if part of a gene is deleted, the protein produced will be shorter and may not work any more

GENE REGULATION

Gene regulation is a process in which a cell determines which genes it will express and when it will take place.This term can also be said as regulation of gene expression.So this process is essential for viruses,prokaryotes, and eukaryotes.The first discovered example of a gene regulation system was the lac operon in which protein involved in lactose metabolism are expressed only in the presence of lactose and absence of glucose.Furthermore, gene regulation drives the processes of cellular differentiation leading to the creation of different cell types in multicellular organisms where the different types of cells may possess different gene expression profiles though they all possess the same genome sequence.

PHYLOGENETICS

Phylogenetics is the field of biology which deals with identifying and understanding the relationships between the many different kinds of life on earth. This includes methods for collecting and analyzing data, as well as interpretations of those results as new biological information.Going into the details phylogenetics is the study of evolutionary relation among various groups of organisms which is discovered through molecular sequencing data.But the problem posed by this field is that genetic data are only available for the present, and fossil records are less reliable.But nevertheless this field is a very fascinating field to explore and study.