Plant, Cellular and Molecular Biology

Bioinformatics in Plant Science

Bioinformatics is a term which is tightly linked to the International Collaboration in genome sequencing projects and to the efforts of the pharmaceuticals industry in its drive for drug discovery and development etc. Bioinformatics allows us to come to the terms with the vast amount of data being generated by the genome sequencing projects. Powerful tools are needed to organize the data and to extend our ability to analyse these complex biological complex systems. Bioinformatics cover many topics including databases on regulatory sequences; the regulation of gene expression; analyse and recognition of genome sequences; gene structure; gene prediction; modelling of transcriptional and translational control; large scale genomics on crop improvement.

In plant biology, these tools are helpful in improving the crop, improving nutrition quality. It also aids in studying medicinal plants with the help of genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, and helps in improving the quality of traditional medicinal material. Genomics helps in providing massive information to improve crop phenotype. Bioinformatics has tools to analyse biological sequences like DNA, RNA and protein sequences. ‘Multiple alignments’ provides a method to estimate the number of genes in the gene families and also in the identification of the previously unidentified genes. The multiple alignment information helps in studying the gene expression pattern in plants. Computational tools are very much helpful in identification of ergonomically important gene by comparative analysis between crop plant and model species. Bioinformatics mainly deals with - 1. DNA, RNA and protein sequence 2. Molecular structure 3.Expression data.