Bioinformatics

What is it?

A computer This website is all about bioinformatics. But exactly what is it?

Bioinformatics is the use of computers to solve biological and biomedical problems

To study plants or animal behaviour, a biologist will not necessarily need a computer. Therefore, it may not be clear right away why bioinformatics is so important. To illustrate the benefit of computers in biology, we will start with a simple mathematical problem...

How big is your DNA?

Have you ever wondered how much DNA you have in your cells? And in your body?

In every cell, you have 3·10⁹ base pairs (3 billion, 3000 million, or 3,000,000,000). Two DNA-strands form one double helix, which can be represented as a twisted ladder, with every base pair forming one step. The distance between two steps is 0.00000000034 m (0.34 nanometer, or 0.34·10^-9 m).

Exercise 1:

Calculate the length of the DNA from 1 cell. Answer

Exercise 2:

Calculate the total length of all the DNA in your body, given that:

An adult has an estimated 75 million million (7.5·10¹³) cells.
Every cell contains the same amount of DNA.

To give you an idea of distances: the distance from Earth to Moon is 3.8·10⁵km, the distance to the Sun is 1.5·10⁸ km. Express the total length of your DNA as trips to the Moon and the Sun. Answers

Exercise 3:

Imagine that you have to write down all the letters of the DNA from one cell in a big book. Every book contains 1000 pages, and every page fits 10.000 letters. How many books would you need? If each book is 5 cm thick and you stack all the books, how tall would the stack be? Answers

Exercise 4:

Fortunately, we live in an era where we do not need to carry too many books around. We have computers and new methods of storing information. If every letter of the DNA of one cell took one byte, how many DVD-ROMS of 4.7 GB (4.7 billion bytes) would you need? Answer

You now know how much DNA your body contains and what a tremendous amount of information this is.

Computers are essential for the storage of large amounts of data

Imagine that you have a stack of ......... phone books sorted by name, and you have to find the number 03 400 40 41 (for Belgium). How would you do that? It certainly seems like an impossible task.
Fortunately, computers provide a feasible solution: use an online phonebook that provides a reverse lookup service. This won't take more than a couple of minutes!

Computers are essential for finding information among large amounts of data.