Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills

Chapter 7. Sequence Analysis, Pairwise Alignment, and Database Searching

We now begin our tour of bioinformatics tools in earnest. In the next five chapters, we describe some of the software tools and applications you can expect to see in current research in computational biology. From gene sequences to the proteins they encode to the complicated biological networks they are involved in, computational methods are available to help you analyze data and formulate hypotheses. We have focused on commonly used software packages and packages we have used; to attempt to encompass every detail of every program out there, however, we'd need to turn every chapter in this book into a book of its own.

The first tools we describe are those that analyze protein and DNA sequence data. Sequence data is the most abundant type of biological data available electronically. While other databases may eventually rival them in size, the importance of sequence databases to biology remains central. Pairwise sequence comparison, which we discuss in this chapter, is the most essential technique in computational biology. It allows you to do everything from sequence-based database searching, to building evolutionary trees and identifying characteristic features of protein families, to creating homology models. But it's also the key to larger projects, limited only by your imagination—comparing genomes, exploring the sequence determinants of protein structure, connecting expression data to genomic information, ...