Since man started to learn and develop, he has encountered many problems and this learning has made him able to create tools and discover the hidden secrets of nature and he manipulated them for his own needs. In short, the reason behind every invention, every discovery was only and only one, which was “Solve the problem”. Man classified the knowledge into groups and subgroups. And one of them is referred to as Biology which is specifically directed to solve the problems related to life and living organisms.
Biology has so much diversity which makes it impossible to cover for a person that may even live for 1000 years. Biology covers all the materialistic aspects of life that may be present in a 30 meters long blue-whale or it may be a nanobe which is a smallest life form known to man.
Biology made it possible for us to understand how the machine or the body with a life works. We used the principle of Physics and Chemistry in Biology and created separate fields of study which we refer to as Biophysics and Biochemistry respectively. These are not only the examples of the interdisciplinary sciences, the problems of biology expanded their territory and we needed a new perspective and non-traditional ways to solve them and to face these problems, Bioinformatics was based. Bioinformatics use the Mathematical, Statistical and Computational approach to solve the problems related to Biology. The world is changing its course towards Data Science which is even being applied in the field of Biology. William Vorhies, the Editorial Director at the Data Science Central, says, “The Next Big Thing in Data Science is… Biology”.
Why Bioinformatics has an Upper-Hand over Other Biological Fields?
Current biological problems require effective, faster and more precise solutions. And bioinformatics comes with all these answers which it faces with the use of the latest technology in hand and advanced tools to solve the problems which are faced in every biological aspect. Computer aided drug design gives an upper hand over the traditional methods that cost a huge amount of investment of time and financial worth. Bioinformatics with its ability to use Artificial intelligence and more adaptive methods to encounter these problems are the viable solutions. In the recent decades, the rate of addition of the new data has multiplied in an exponential manner and the biological data has cause this explosion even bigger which is even more hectic to handle and hence the requirement to store, annotate and analyze this information is addressed by the Bioinformatics, which makes it as the necessity.
Currently, the pandemic situation of the COVID19 is being handled by the Bioinformatics in a haste manner. Bioinformatics was the only option for the biologist to counter this problem and it proved to be the ideal solution in the current situation. Many Technological companies like IBM, Amazon, Google, Hewlett Packard and Institutes like MIT, RPI, NASA and others formed a consortium to support the research against the COVID19. This consortium has 16 supercomputers assigned the task to counter this pandemic which makes 775,000 CPU cores and 34,000 GPUs. That computing power is tasked with running huge calculations for molecular modeling, epidemiology and Bioinformatics.
Bioinformatics is the future of Biological Sciences in every aspect and opens the new doors of opportunities. It is currently in its evolving phase and in the next coming decades it will rule the world of not just Biology but Data Science. And rather than limiting the biology to the traditional methods it allows us to face the problem from a whole new perspective by not just designing an algorithm and compiling a code but by coding a life.
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