Software development refers to the process of formulating, specifying, documenting, programming, designing, testing, error handling and bug fixing involved in generation and maintenance of various software applications and components. Software development is actually a process of writing and maintaining the source code through successive and precise phases in an orderly manner. This process not only involves writing the scripts, but also the preparations of the design, requirements and objectives of what is to be coded and the endorsement of what is developed has met the objectives.
Phases of Software development
A typical software can be developed in the following phases:
Identification of the software that is required to perform a specific task.
Analysis of software requirements.
Detailed specification of the software requirement.
Software design.
Programming/coding.
Testing.
Maintenance.
Bioinformatics software Development
Bioinformatics focuses on using the mathematical and statistical techniques for the development of methods and software tools for understanding the biological data. Since, Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary research area, it has become an important part of today’s biological research in the storage, analysis and interpretation of experimental data. Bioinformatics has emerged as a highly dynamic discipline, with new or updated versions of software tools and databases being developed continually. Such automated tools perform a wide range of tasks by allowing the extraction of useful information from huge amounts of raw data, and in most of the cases, by providing graphical interpretations of these datasets.
Bioinformatics software tools can be developed for:
Metabolomic and proteomic data analysis
DNA sequence editing and primer designing
NGS and metagenomics analysis and statistics
Sequence alignment and phylogenetics
Scientific computing
Microscope image processing and gel analysis
Microarray analysis
Molecular graphics systems
Drug discovery
2D and 3D molecular structure modeling
Biological pathway and network analysis
Need of user-friendly tools/softwares in Bioinformatics
With the advancements and inventions of revolutionary wet lab techniques and approaches, scientists have been enabled of extracting huge amount of raw data from different experiment (e.g., whole genome sequencing) but for such huge datasets, it is near to impossible to extract the meaningful and useful information for the further analysis of a particular project. Moreover, such huge datasets require quite a long time to analyze and extract the useful information, when analyzing the data manually, which is a tiresome and hectic job, too.
Nonetheless, in most of the cases majority of the scientists at the forefront of experimental research are not bioinformaticians, so a gap exists between the user-friendly software needed and the scripting/programming infrastructure often employed for the analysis of large numbers of genes, long genomic segments and groups of sequences.
Consequently, there is a need for the expansion of the fundamental paradigms under which biologist-friendly software tools are designed and developed to fulfill the needs of biologists to analyze large datasets by using sophisticated computational methods. therefore, it is important to develop user-friendly and efficient tools and databases that provide effective and comprehensive results within a limited and shorter time.
Languages for Bioinformatics Software Development
Following is the list of languages that are being utilized for Bioinformatics software development:
Python
R
C++
Perl
Bash
Java
For detailed information about these languages and how they’re being utilized in the field of Bioinformatics, you can read our detailed blog on “Bioinformatics Scripting” from the Blogs section of BioCode website or use the link: https://www.biocode.ltd/post/bioinformatics-scripting
Bioinformatics Software Development at BioCode & BioinfoLytics
If you want to learn programming to design small softwares for a particular Bioinformatics analysis, you can join our Gold Bioinformatics plans at very affordable prices and you can be an expert programmer in any of the Bioinformatics programming languages (Python & R). To join our Gold Bioinformatics plans, visit us at https://www.biocode.ltd/ and enroll yourself to develop your programming skills.
If you are stuck with a biological problem, and don’t know how to work with a programming language, We’ve got your back!
Our skilled bioinformaticians will help you provide their services for R scripting, Python scripting, Bioinformatics tool development, and more.
Furthermore, if you’ve the expertise of developing such bioinformatics tools and softwares, you are more than welcome to join our platform of BioinfoLytics, where you can provide your services as a freelancer.
For further information on our services, visit us at https://www.biocode.ltd/bioinfolytics
Or directly contact us at bioinfolytics@biocode.ltd